Creating SERS Sandwich Assays for Disease Diagnosis in Rural Areas

Dr. Kevin M. SpencerEIC Laboratories Inc.Creating SERS Sandwich Assays for Disease Diagnosis in Rural AreasThere is a rural health care gap that along with other factors is caused by a lack of easily accessibledoctors clinics specialists and diagnostic testing facilities.As a result the rural population is lesslikely to see a specialist and to schedule follow up appointments.One way to close the rural/urbanhealth care gap is to provide inexpensive easy-to-use diagnostic tests that a rural practitioner canperform in an office/clinic setting while the patient is still present.Detection of biomarkers inbiofluids for the detection of cancers infections and early onset dementia holds promise as a meansto achieve this goal.Current biomarker diagnostics are too costly complicated or time consumingto be practical in a rural setting particularly when multiple biomarkers need to be analyzedsimultaneously.To reach the desired goal this program will develop multicomponent surface- enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) sandwich assays that simultaneously measure 6 or moredisease-defining biomarkers and provide an automated result to the practitioner within 10 minutesof receiving a biofluid from the patient.The practitioner will only need to add sample to theinstrument snap the SERS applicator into place press start and receive test results.The Phase Iobjective will be to demonstrate the ability of a SERS sandwich assay to simultaneously detecttwo prostate cancer biomarkers in urine at medically relevant concentrations. Signal linearitylimits of detection reproducibility and false positive/negative rates will be quantified.The PhaseII program will extend the original SERS sandwich assay to simultaneously monitor six prostatecancer biomarkers and to create a pancreatic cancer biomarker assay.Program results will create cost effective disease diagnostic tests that can be performed quickly bythe practitioner.Based on patient information the practitioner can choose the appropriate SERSprobe and rapidly verify disease presence/absence.Not only will these tests close the urban/ruralhealth care gap they can be an efficient prescreening tool in any environment lowering overallhealth care costs.EIC will commercialize the instrument software and SERS sandwich diseasedetection assays.This program can be extended to a wide variety of diseases and infectionsunlocking a significant commercial market.1