Accurate point-of-care (POC) analysis of cancer markers
is the
essence in the comprehensive early screening and treatment of cancer.
Dual-mode synchronous detection is one of the effective approaches
to reduce the probability of false negatives or false positives. As
a result, this can greatly improve the accuracy of diagnosis. In this
work, a surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)–temperature
dual-mode T-type lateral flow strip was fabricated to direct and simultaneous
POC detection of total and free prostate-specific antigens (t-PSA
and f-PSA) in blood. With the advantage of high stability of T-type
lateral flow strip and simultaneous acquirement of assay results for
t-PSA and f:t PSA ratio, the proposed method has high accuracy in
the diagnosis of prostate cancer, especially in the diagnostic gray
zone between 4.0 and 10.0 ng/mL. The SERS–temperature dual-signal
has a good linear correlation with either f-PSA or t-PSA. To evaluate
the clinical diagnostic performance of the proposed method, spiked
human serum samples and the whole blood sample were analyzed. The
assay results showed good recovery, and compared with traditional
electrochemiluminescence immunoassay (ECLIA) method (t-PSA: 43.151;
f/t ratio: 0.08), the results obtained by the proposed method were
similar (t-PSA: 40.15 (SERS), 36.21 (temperature); f/t ratio: 0.08
(SERS), 0.08 (temperature), but the detection time (15 min) and cost
($0.05) had been greatly reduced. Therefore, the proposed SERS–temperature
synchronous dual-mode T-type lateral flow strip has a strong application
potential in the field of accurate large-scale diagnostics of prostate
cancer on-site by simultaneous POC detection of t-PSA and f-PSA in
blood.