Background: To realize the promise of personalized medicine, diagnostic instruments used for detecting and measuring biomarkers must become smaller, faster and less expensive. Although most techniques used currently to detect biomarkers are sensitive and specific, many suffer from several disadvantages including their complexity, high cost and long turnaround time. One strategy to overcome these problems is to exploit carbon nanotube (CNT) based biosensors, which are sensitive, use inexpensive disposable components and can be easily adapted to current assay protocols. In this study we investigated the applicability of using a CNT field-effect transistor (CNT-FET) as a diagnostic instrument for measuring cancer biomarkers in serum using a mouse model of Breast Cancer Susceptibility 1-related breast cancer. Insulin like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) was chosen because it is highly relevant in breast cancer and because measuring serum IGF-1 levels by conventional methods is complicated due to specific IGF-1 serum binding proteins.
Findings: Our results show that there is good correlation between the two platforms with respect to detecting serum IGF-1. In fact, the CNT-FETs required only one antibody, gave real-time results and required approximately 100-fold less mouse serum than the radioimmunoassay.
Conclusions: Both IGF-1 radioimmuno and CNT-FET assays gave comparable results. Indeed, the CNT-FET assay was simpler and faster than the radioimmunoassay. Additionally, the low serum sample required by CNT-FETs can be especially advantageous for studies constricted by limited amount of human clinical samples and for mouse studies, since animals often need to be sacrificed to obtain enough serum for biomarker evaluation.