AbstractIn this work, we proposed to utilize three-dimensional porous copper foam (CF) as conductive substrate and precursor of in-situ growth CuO nanowires (NWs) for fabricating electrochemical nonenzymatic glucose sensors. The CF supplied high surface area due to its unique three-dimensional porous foam structure and thus resulted in high sensitivity for glucose detection. The CuO NWs/CF based nonenzymatic sensors presented reliable selectivity, good repeatability, reproducibility and stability. In addition, the CuO NWs/CF based nonenzymatic sensors have been employed for practical applications and the glucose concentration in human serum was measured to be 4.96 ± 0.06 mM, agreed well with the value measured from the commercial available glucose sensor in hospital and the glucose concentration in saliva was also estimated to be 0.91 ± 0.04 mM, which indicated that the CuO NWs/CF owned the possibility for noninvasive glucose detection. The rational design of CuO NWs/CF provided an efficient strategy for fabricating of electrochemical nonenzymatic biosensors.