School of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering and Physical Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Department of Physics, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Nat Biomed Eng. 2020 Jun;4(6):610-623. doi: 10.1038/s41551-019-0510-4. Epub 2020 Feb 3.
Current technologies for the point-of-care diagnosis of traumatic brain injury (TBI) lack sensitivity, require specialist handling or involve complicated and costly procedures. Here, we report the development and testing of an optofluidic device for the rapid and label-free detection, via surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), of picomolar concentrations of biomarkers for TBI in biofluids. The SERS-active substrate of the device consists of electrohydrodynamically fabricated submicrometre pillars covered with a plasmon-active nanometric gold layer, integrated in an optofluidic chip. We show that the device can detect N-acetylasparate in finger-prick blood samples from patients with TBI, and that the biomarker is released immediately from the central nervous system after TBI. The simplicity, sensitivity and robustness of SERS-integrated optofluidic technology might eventually help the triaging of TBI patients and assist clinical decision making at point-of-care settings.
目前用于创伤性脑损伤 (TBI) 即时诊断的技术缺乏灵敏度，需要专业处理或涉及复杂且昂贵的程序。在这里，我们报告了一种光流控设备的开发和测试，该设备可通过表面增强拉曼散射 (SERS) 对生物流体中 TBI 的生物标志物进行快速和无标记检测，其检测浓度可达皮摩尔级。该设备的 SERS 活性衬底由电动力学制造的亚微米级柱子组成，柱子表面覆盖有等离子体活性的纳米金层，并集成在光流控芯片中。我们表明，该设备可以检测 TBI 患者指尖血样中的 N-乙酰天冬氨酸，并且在 TBI 后该生物标志物会立即从中枢神经系统中释放出来。SERS 集成的光流控技术的简单性、灵敏度和鲁棒性最终可能有助于 TBI 患者的分诊，并在即时护理环境中协助临床决策。
