Original source: Materials Today
Engineers at Monash University in Australia have unlocked the door to earlier detection of cancer with a world-first study identifying a potential new testing method that could save millions of lives. The engineers developed a sensor that utilizes new, more sensitive materials to look for key markers of disease in the body and found it could increase detection sensitivity by up to 10,000 times.
Qiaoliang Bao, an associate professor in Monash University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, along with research colleagues at universities in China, found that antimonene, a 2D material that can be exfoliated from bulk antimony, has greater sensitivity than graphene for detecting DNA and microRNA associated with cancer.
The study, described in a paper in Nature Communications, provides a significant advance in the detection of the biomarkers microRNA-21 and microRNA-155. These are found in many tumors that lead to pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer, triple-negative breast cancer and osteosarcoma.
MicroRNA are small molecules that are emerging as ideal non-invasive biomarkers for applications in toxicology, diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Biomarkers have the potential to predict, diagnose and monitor diseases like cancer, but are difficult to detect.
“The detection of tumor-specific circulating microRNA at an ultrahigh sensitivity is of utmost significance for the early diagnosis and monitoring of cancer,” said Bao. “Unfortunately, microRNA detection remains challenging because they are present at low levels and comprise less than 0.01% of the total RNA mass in a given sample. Therefore, new approaches are urgently needed for clinical disease diagnosis.”
To produce such a new approach, the engineers developed a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor using antimonene materials and performed a number of studies to detect microRNA-21 and microRNA-155. Their findings show that the sensor could achieve a detection limit of 10aM, up to 10,000 times better than existing microRNA sensors.
According to Bao, this world-first study using antimonene materials for clinical advancement constitutes an opportunity for future research into the development of sensors and systems for early cancer diagnosis. “Antimonene has quickly attracted the attention of the scientific community because its physicochemical properties are superior to those of typical 2D materials like graphene and black phosphorous,” he said.
“The combination of antimonene with SPR architecture provides a low-cost and non-destructive improvement in the detection of microRNA, which could ultimately help millions of people globally by improving early diagnosis of cancer.”
The research was conducted through FLEET (The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technology) – a collaboration of more than 100 researchers at seven Australian universities and 13 Australian and international science organisations. It also involved researchers at Shenzhen University, Jilin University and Wuhan University in China.