A high sensitivity prostate-specific antigen SERS detection platform based on laser resonance nanoparticles†

Abstract

Accurate quantitative analysis of cancer-related specific biomarkers in clinical serum is very important for the early diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Hospitals often use serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) as a biomarker associated with prostate cancer diagnosis and prognosis, and prostate cancer cells often produce more PSA than benign cells, leading to elevated PSA levels in the blood. In this study, an immunoassay based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) was established for the detection of PSA employing magnetic beads along with SERS nanotags. The hospital currently takes two hours to test the results, the equipment price is high, and the detection price is high, and the penetration rate in township hospitals in China is low. SERS has super-sensitive and fast detection ability, and the availability of the detection result in 10 minutes significantly reduces the waiting time. Besides, the detection method is simple, cheap and portable, making it suitable for township health centers. To evaluate the clinical applicability of this method, 75 male clinical serum samples were tested, most of which were in the gray area of 4.0–10.0 ng mL⁻¹. The experimental results show that our detection method has good agreement with the results measured by the electrochemical luminescence (ECL) system in the hospital clinical laboratory. Our detection limit for actual samples from patients can reach 0.029 ng mL⁻¹. Therefore, our clinical serum PSA marker detection method based on SERS has a great potential market in towns and villages.