Electrochemical ELISA systems for the rapid, low cost and point of need analysis of clinical samples

Electrochemical biosensor systems are a promising route to low cost and simple to use diagnostic solutions for a range of diseases. One particularly challenging area for timely diagnosis is cancer. This is because symptoms are often vague and non-specific until the disease has reached a stage where treatment options are more limited and the prognosis is poor. An idea that is gaining increasing traction is that of the "liquid biopsy" where easy to access bodily fluids are investigated for early signs of cancer. This includes the use of blood, serum, plasma, urine and saliva to look for clinically relevant biomarkers. Such biomarkers can include specific proteins, e.g. Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) in prostate cancer, or combinations of multiple inflammatory biomarkers such as tumour necrosis factor alpha, IL-6 and C-reactive protein. In addition to proteins, nucleic acid sequences and specifically DNA sequences circulating freely in the blood which contain cancerous mutations are also an increasingly important biomarker for cancer.
Currently, cancerous biomarkers such as those mentioned are assayed using large, high throughput systems such as the recently introduced GRAIL system. These techniques are expensive and still do not achieve high diagnostic accuracy.
The goal of this project is to develop simple to use point of care technologies which can be used in the primary healthcare environment to screen for cancer at extremely low cost and improve the triage of patients towards specialist oncology units. To achieve this the following technical goals will be pursued:
1) Development of a low cost sensor array - ideally on a PCB substrate
2) Screening a set of pancreatic cancer samples for biomarker signals
3) Using advanced signal processing techniques to establish a panel of biomarkers for pancreatic cancer
4) Developing an electrochemical ELISA system to measure protein markers of pancreatic cancer
5) Developing a circulating tumour DNA system to measure mutated DNA indicative of pancreatic cancer
6) Combine the above aspects into a prototype low cost system