Tumor Marker Detection Based On Nanoscale Optics Microfluidic Chips

The early diagnosis of tumors have great significance in improving the patient’s survival rate,reducing the patient’s pain and economic burden.The quantities of tumor markers in human blood reflect not only the stage of the disease but also the effectiveness of treatment in some cases.Therefore,the detection of tumor makers in human blood gives significant clues for many kinds of cancers.Currently,the detection process relies on the large-scale apparatus,which is expensive and usually located in the central hospital.This inflexibility can cause difficulties for patients,especially when they live in remote places or when an immediate clinical decision is needed.In addition,the rapid development of the Internet of Things era has also put forward more requirements for portable diagnosis.With regard to this,a portable,low-cost and sensitive diagnostic tool for rapid detection is quite in demand.We present a new scheme based on surface plasmonic nanoscale optics for portable detection of tumor markers,which uses on-chip spectral biosensing in combination with nanoimprint lithography,microfluidics and antibody functionalization in this thesis.The well-designed metallic nanostructures on the chips ensure the high sensitivity for different concentrations of various tumor markers captured on the sensing chips.Both the sensing chip and the optical configuration are compact and cost-effective for a quick detection.By simply analyzing the spectra of reflected light,the parallel detection for many individuals and the multi-biomarker sensing for one individual can be achieved within 30 minutes.The detection capability for the carcinoembryonic antigen(CEA,the most widely used tumor marker in clinical medicine)concentration of less than 5ng/ml is achieved in the experiments,which is much lower than the CEA cancer diagnosis threshold of 20ng/ml.Clinical tests of the chips on detecting CEA in human serum samples demonstrate good agreement with conventional medical examinations,and great advantages on simultaneous multichannel detections for high-throughput and multi-marker biosensing.In addition,we use a miniature spectrometer and the development board to form a detection system,and use the smartphone for data analysis and display.Our discovery of this study provides promising opportunities on low-cost and compact medical devices and systems for portable detection of tumor markers,and it also has great importance for the development of point-of-care testing and mobile healthcare.