Nanoplasmonic cytokine biosensor towards precision medicine

Abstract

The framework of precision medicine envisions a world in which diseases are diagnosed not simply on the basis of a patient's symptoms but on accumulated data that reveals the fundamental mechanistic bases of human diseases. This raises an emerging clinical demand for transformative tools/biosensors that can measure the biochemical and biological markers to understand the dynamical response of the patient status in a rapid and accurate manner. Nanoplasmonic biosensors have shown great promise to enable such phenotypic measurements with high precision, sensitivity, specificity and simplicity. In this paper, we present a gold nanorod based opto-microfluidic sensing platform for monitoring functional immune response and their translation in clinical applications towards precision medicine. Specifically, we show a label-free, barcode LSPR nanoplasmonic biosensor for high-throughput, multiplex detection of cytokine biomarkers in a complex serum matrix and patient serum samples. Our strategy of monitoring immune functions using optofluidic nanobiosensors achieved high accuracy and sensitivity with much less sample volume and shorter assay time than that of the conventional methods, which provides new insight into disease severity and therapeutic response and offers great potential in future medical treatment for personalized medicine.