Chen Xiaoyong, Xu Pin, Lin Wenwei, Jiang Jin, Qu Hang, Hu Xuehao, Sun Jinghua, Cui Yukun
School of Electrical Engineering and Intelligentization, Dongguan University of Technology, Dongguan 523808, China.
Equal contributors.
Biomed Opt Express. 2022 Mar 16;13(4):2117-2129. doi: 10.1364/BOE.454645. eCollection 2022 Apr 1.
The detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) still faces a huge challenge partially because of low abundance of CTCs (1-10 cells/mL). In this work, a plasmonic titled fiber Bragg grating biosensor is proposed for detection of breast cancer cells. The biosensor is made by an 18° TFBG with a 50 nm-thick gold nanofilm coating over the surface of the fiber, further immobilized with a specific antibody against GPR30, which is a membrane receptor expressed in many breast cancers, serving as bait. In vitro tests have confirmed that the proposed biosensor can detect breast cancer cells in concentration of 5 cells/mL within 20 minutes and has good linearity in the range of 5-1000 cells/mL, which has met the requirement of CTC detection in real conditions. Furthermore, theoretical analysis based on the experimental results shows that the limit of detection can even reach single-cell level. Our proposed biosensor has a simple structure, is easy to manufacture, is of small size, and has a good performance, making it a good choice for real-time, label-free, and milliliter-volume detection of cancer cells in future.
循环肿瘤细胞（CTC）的检测仍然面临巨大挑战，部分原因是CTC的丰度较低（1 - 10个细胞/毫升）。在这项工作中，提出了一种表面等离子体倾斜光纤布拉格光栅生物传感器用于检测乳腺癌细胞。该生物传感器由一个18°的倾斜光纤布拉格光栅（TFBG）制成，在光纤表面涂覆有50纳米厚的金纳米膜，并进一步固定了一种针对GPR30的特异性抗体，GPR30是在许多乳腺癌中表达的一种膜受体，用作诱饵。体外测试已证实，所提出的生物传感器能够在20分钟内检测出浓度为5个细胞/毫升的乳腺癌细胞，并且在5 - 1000个细胞/毫升的范围内具有良好的线性，这满足了实际条件下CTC检测的要求。此外，基于实验结果的理论分析表明，检测限甚至可以达到单细胞水平。我们提出的生物传感器结构简单，易于制造，尺寸小，性能良好，使其成为未来对癌细胞进行实时、无标记和毫升级体积检测的良好选择。
