Metabolic Fingerprinting on a Plasmonic Gold Chip for Mass Spectrometry Based in Vitro Diagnostics

ACS Cent Sci. 2018 Feb 28;4(2):223-229. doi: 10.1021/acscentsci.7b00546. Epub 2018 Jan 12.

Abstract

Current metabolic analysis is far from ideal to engage clinics and needs rationally designed materials and device. Here we developed a novel plasmonic chip for clinical metabolic fingerprinting. We first constructed a series of chips with gold nanoshells on the surface through controlled particle synthesis, dip-coating, and gold sputtering for mass production. We integrated the optimized chip with microarrays for laboratory automation and micro-/nanoscaled experiments, which afforded direct high-performance metabolic fingerprinting by laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry using 500 nL of various biofluids and exosomes. Further we for the first time demonstrated on-chip in vitro metabolic diagnosis of early stage lung cancer patients using serum and exosomes. This work initiates a new bionanotechnology based platform for advanced metabolic analysis toward large-scale diagnostic use.