Early screening of cancer can effectively prolong survival time and reduce cancer mortality. However, the existing health-monitoring devices can only be carried out in professional laboratories, so large-scale early cancer screening in resource-limited settings is hardly achieved. To embrace the challenge, we developed a novel chemiluminescence immunoassay (CLIA) analyzer that does not require a professional operation. Then, it was applied to detect carbohydrate antigen 50 (CA50), a non-organ-specific tumor marker for screening various cancers. As a result, the analyzer exhibited excellent performance that the total assay time was only 15 min, and the detection limit reached 0.057 U ml-1. A coefficient of variance (CV) less than 15% was well-controlled for both intra- and inter-assay precision, and the linear range was 0-500 U ml-1. More importantly, this analyzer can continuously detect 60 samples per hour without any professional paramedic. Finally, this analyzer has been applied to evaluate clinical samples and the detected results showed a good correlation with the clinical test results (correlation coefficient, 0.9958). These characteristics exactly meet large-scale and high-throughput early screening of cancer. Thus, this miniaturized analyzer for CA50 detection is promising to achieve early large-scale screening of cancer in the resource-limited grassroots community.
Keywords: carbohydrate antigen 50; chemiluminescence immunoassay; large-scale screening of cancer; miniaturized analyzer; point-of-care detection.
Copyright © 2022 Liu, He, Zou, Ouyang, Huang, Yang and Wang.