A semi-automated microfluidic electrochemiluminescent device for detecting mulple cancer biomarker proteins.

摘要

Cancer biomarkers that are overexpressed and secreted into the blood during early stages of cancer, can indicate cancer and be used to guide therapy even before the onset of detectable tumors. In some patients, a single biomarker may be poorly expressed in their blood serum and therefore associated with false positives and false negatives. Detecting elevated levels of a panel of protein cancer biomarkers in serum for a particular cancer will reduce false positives and false negatives. Future point of care devices that can be used in doctor's offices and hospitals for early cancer detection and personalized therapy must be simple, cost effective, automated and capable of measuring multiple proteins simultaneously on a single chip.;This dissertation focuses on developing new methodology for detecting multiple proteins on a single chip. Main goal of this dissertation is to establish a representative electrochemiluminescence (ECL) platform to provide fast, simple and cost effective point of care device. In this dissertation, the proof of concept ECL immunosensor system was developed combining single wall nanotubes and Ru(bpy)32+ doped silica nanoparticle labels and tripropylamine as correactant. The proof of concept ECL immunosensor was adapted to develop the ECL array that was further integrated to develop a prototype microfluidic device for highly sensitive detection of multiple cancer biomarkers. This prototype microfluidic device was later improvised to enable semi-atomization. The major advantage of this device is that the array base is a simple pyrolytic graphite block connected to a potentiostat, and avoids microelectronic fabrication. Secondly the microfluidic design and device fabrication does not involve complicated engineering and is simple and cost-effective, which is one of the requirements of POC devices. Moreover this design can be expandable for detecting any number of proteins on a single chip. With follow up work that is pursued in our lab this device holds promise as a future point of care device.