Automated microsystem for electrochemical detection of cancer markers

The development of a fully automated microsystem housing an amperometric immunosensor is presented. The microfluidic cell integrates reagent storage and electrochemical immunodetection and was applied for the detection of breast cancer markers. The main advantage of this system is that no external fluidic storage is required and the instrumental setup is thus greatly simplified. The fluidics of the microsystem is computer controlled and requires minimal end-user intervention. The analytical performance of the device was compared with a manually driven system and applied for the amperometric detection of the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and cancer antigen 15-3 (CA15-3). This automation methodology greatly improves the analytical performance of the immunosensor in terms of accuracy and reproducibility as evidenced by a reduction of LOD observed for CEA and CA15-3 with respect to a manually driven system. Finally, the automated microsystem was applied for the analysis of real patient serum samples, demonstrating excellent correlation with a commercial ELISA.