Direct electrochemical differentiations of cancer and normal cells on the titanate
by Alismail, Hanan; Du, Yuchun; Zhou, Jianhong; Tian, Z. Ryan
In the development of new cancer diagnostic tools, inventing a new technol. that can differentiate cancer cells from normal cells are critical to the cancer cell sensors with minimized false neg. and false pos. signals. In parallel, the cancer cell sensors reported in the literature to date are mostly based on some signal transductions on a materials surface far from that of a typical bioscaffold, which detects the cancerous cells in a foreign environment with some built-in phys. and/or chem. stresses onto the cells. Here we report a new invention that turns a bioscaffold into an electrochem. sensor, which has been seldom reported in the literature to the best of our knowledge. This bioscaffold-based sensor has distinguished cancer cells from normal cells simply, directly, sensitively, and reproducible for the first time. In this work, the electrochem. sensory nanofibers of titanate (low-cost bioceramics) were grown and entangled into the bioscaffodls first of all on top of a titanium metal, which were characterized by means of XRD, SEM, TEM, etc. The bioscaffodls were then incubated with two types of human breast cancer cells, benign and aggressive, and one type of normal breast cells, in both sep. and mixed cases. The different cells have reproducibly shown significant differences in impedance change at high frequencies on the sensory bioscaffolds. On this basis, different ratios of the cancer cells in the normal cells shifted the mixture's impedance signals quant. and reproducibly. This new discovery has suggested that the cancer cells have altered the bioscaffolds surface charge-d. much more than the normal cells while binding to the surface of nanofibers of the bioscaffold. This disruptive sensor is potentially useful in electrochem. sensing of both cancerous cells and bacteria at ultra low-cost and in real-time, which are potentially doable even in vivo thanks to the implantable nature of the bioscaffold.