Pathogen infection can lead to deterioration of physical fitness, organ function decline, and even death, and the continuous interhuman transmissions contribute to the epidemic outbreak. The rapid and sensitive detection of pathogens in clinical samples at scale thus becomes critical to infectious disease screening and containing outbreaks. Traditional detection methods, including microbial culture and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technologies, involve bulky instrumentation in centralized laboratories, professional technicians, and a lengthy assay time, hence severely hampering the suppression of infection chains and disease treatment. Advanced diagnostic technologies capable of rapidly identifying pathogens are therefore ideal for prompting infection diagnosis and precision medicine. Point-of-care testing (POCT) devices, usually consisting of recognition elements and signal transduction units, offer a promising alternative as they can detect pathogens specifically and give qualitative results within a short time. By overcoming the issues of time-consuming growth culture and complex sample treatment, POCT devices can remarkably expedite the sample-to-result time of infection diagnosis with high sensitivity, thus allowing clinicians to quickly make decisions. Recent years have seen major progress in the development of functional materials that show unique physical and chemical properties to facilitate the performance enhancement of POCT devices, including inorganic nanomaterials, organic polymers, biomaterials, and the like. By contributing to the biorecognition and transduction of biological binding events into electrical and optical readout, functional materials at the interfaces between POCT sensors and the biological samples enable measurements with higher sensitivity and selectivity and faster responses. Hence, the development of high-performance functional materials is expected to increase the microbial detection efficiency of POCT devices by simplifying sample handling and improving the accuracy, thereby aiding in the on-site and real-time detection of pathogens and the large-scale screening of infectious diseases. In this Account, to clarify the potential of POCT devices coupled with functional materials in the rapid diagnosis of infectious diseases, we summarized the applications of materials-engineering-based POCT devices for human pathogen detection in terms of the types of functional materials, such as magnetic materials, metallic materials, luminescent materials, functional nucleic acids, and so forth. Based on our previous studies, we highlighted the abilities of functional materials-assisted POCT devices to detect pathogens in multiple actual biological samples, including urine, saliva, blood, stool, and so on. These applications provide substantial benefits for pathogen diagnostics with regard to fast response, high sensitivity, ease of use, portability, and low cost. Finally, the challenges and future directions of functional materials for POCT devices aimed at clinical pathogen detection are also briefly summarized.

中文翻译：

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用于病原体检测的材料功能化即时检测设备

病原体感染可导致体质恶化、器官功能下降甚至死亡，持续的人际传播导致疫情暴发。因此，快速、灵敏地大规模检测临床样本中的病原体对于传染病筛查和控制疫情至关重要。传统的检测方法，包括微生物培养和聚合酶链反应（PCR）技术，需要集中实验室的庞大仪器、专业技术人员和较长的检测时间，严重阻碍了感染链的抑制和疾病的治疗。因此，能够快速识别病原体的先进诊断技术是促进感染诊断和精准医疗的理想选择。即时检测（POCT）设备通常由识别元件和信号转导单元组成，是一种很有前景的替代方案，因为它们可以特异性检测病原体并在短时间内给出定性结果。POCT设备克服了生长培养耗时和样本处理复杂的问题，可以显着加快感染诊断的样本到结果的时间，灵敏度高，从而使临床医生能够快速做出决策。近年来，功能材料的开发取得了重大进展，这些材料表现出独特的物理和化学性质，有利于POCT设备性能的增强，包括无机纳米材料、有机聚合物、生物材料等。通过促进生物识别并将生物结合事件转导为电学和光学读数，POCT 传感器和生物样品之间界面的功能材料可以实现更高灵敏度和选择性以及更快响应的测量。因此，高性能功能材料的开发有望通过简化样本处理、提高准确性来提高POCT设备的微生物检测效率，从而有助于病原体的现场实时检测和大规模筛查的传染病。在本报告中，为了阐明 POCT 设备与功能材料结合在传染病快速诊断中的潜力，我们从功能材料的类型方面总结了基于材料工程的 POCT 设备在人类病原体检测中的应用，例如磁性材料、金属材料、发光材料、功能核酸等。基于我们之前的研究，我们强调了功能材料辅助的POCT设备在多种实际生物样本（包括尿液、唾液、血液、粪便等）中检测病原体的能力。这些应用为病原体诊断提供了快速响应、高灵敏度、易用性、便携性和低成本等显着优势。最后，