Nanofiber bioscaffold sensor for cancer cell detection

by Alismail, Hanan; Du, Yuchun; Zhou, Jianhong; Manoharan, Anishkumar; Tian, Z. Ryan

A simple, sensitive, and reliable method that can distinguish cancer cells from normal cells is crit. for cancer screening and treatment, in which little has been reported in literature on turning a bioscaffold into an electrochem. sensor. Here we present some preliminary results from the development of a label-free electrochem. biosensor on a bioscaffold for direct detection of cancer cells in, hopefully, both qual. and quant. manners. In the present work, a sensory nanobioscaffold was incubated with two types of human cancer cells and one type of corresponding normal human cells, resp. These three types of cells showed significant differences on the bioscaffold-sensors, suggesting that these cells upon bounding on the scaffold have altered the surface charge-d. on the nanobioscaffolds. This new method can be potentially used in various important applications in cancer screening and monitoring, which are doable in vivo at ultralow-cost and in real-time.