The chemical specific nature and high–sensitivity of surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has tremendous promise for cancer diagnostics.  Challenges to utilizing SERS in clinical assays include reproducibility and quantitation.  In addition to the challenges associated with SERS, human biofluid samples are complex and contain multiple species that can obscure the signal of the target analyte.  To address these challenges, we have demonstrated a sheath-flow interface for SERS detection in flow. This sheath-flow SERS interface uses hydrodynamic focusing to confine analyte molecules eluting/migrating out of a column onto a planar SERS substrate where the molecules are detected by their intrinsic SERS signal.  Advantages of the sheath-flow SERS detector include small samples sizes (25 – 100 nL) and reproducible SERS signals.  Importantly, the sheath flow environment is resistant to irreversible absorption, which enables high throughput and continuous characterization.  This sheath-flow SERS detector can be readily incorporated for post-separation characterization.  We have successfully coupled this detector to HPLC and CE. Recent work in our laboratory has investigated metabolites and other small molecules present in urine and tumor cell lysates. Our work suggests a new route to identifying these molecules for diagnostic assays.   Using SERS to identify and quantify metabolites may provide improved diagnostics.

SERS detection in biofluids for cancer diagnostics

254th National Meeting (2017)

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