Low-Cost Microf luidic Arrays for Protein-Based Cancer Diagnostics Using ECL Detection

摘要

The new era of Precision Medicine is expected to incorporate data on biomarker proteins in blood along with genomic data on patients and their cancers.' A great deal of interest has been generated in biomarker protein panels for cancer diagnostics.2 Blood levels of certain proteins are biomarkers that can facilitate early cancer detection as well as individualized therapy monitoring. Measurements on protein panels are important to obtain high diagnostic power.1 These approaches promise earlier detection of cancer than possible with current tumor detection approaches and are valuable for therapy management, resulting in improved patient outcomes and decreased mortality. Unfortunately, multiple protein detection has yet to be broadly realized in clinical or point-of-care (POC) diagnostics due to the lack of low cost, sensitive, easy to use devices to measure multiple biomarker proteins in patient serum. There is also a lack of fully validated cancer biomarker protein panels for diagnostics. Time-honored measurement approaches such as Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assays (ELISA) have limitations in sensitivity, analysis time, cost, multiplexing, and sample size. Newer commercial approaches are useful for research, but rely on complex technology that may be too difficult and expensive for the clinic. Most commercial kits cannot achieve sub-pg mL~(-1) detection, but some biomarker proteins have blood levels at or below this range.