HIGH PERFORMANCE, MULTIPLEXED LUNG CANCER BIOMARKER DETECTION ON A PLASMONIC GOLD CHIP

Wei Xu, Jiatao Lou, Hongjie Dai and Kun Qian

School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Chest Hospital and Med-X Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China

Abstract

Diagnosis of lung cancer is performed using a plasmonic gold (pGOLD) chip through multiplexed near-infrared (NIR) detection of carcino-embryonic antigen (CEA), Cyfra21-1, and neuron-specific enolase (NSE) in the serum samples of patients. With 50-fold enhancement of NIR fluorescence, multiplexed microarray analysis of CEA, Cyfra21-1, and NSE in 10 μL of human serum or whole blood samples on pGOLD chip leads to markedly improved limit-of-quantification, limit-of-detection, reproducibility, and higher diagnostic sensitivity and specificity over traditional biochips and Luminex technology currently in use in hospitals. Through multiplexed detection of the three serum cancer biomarkers in a sample, we tested a group of 48 patients with lung cancer and 24 healthy controls and obtained a high sensitivity of 52% and specificity of 96% in differentiating lung cancer patients from healthy control, outperforming the multiplexed Luminex platform(sensitivity of 29% and specificity of 92%) owing to improved assay LOD and LOQ by 5–20 fold for the three cancer biomarkers. This work demonstrated a novel nanotechnology based plasmonic platform for improving the diagnosis of lung cancer toward high performance point-of-care testing.