Leveraging Nanomechanical Perturbations in Raman Spectro-Immunoassays to Design a Versatile Serum Biomarker Detection...

While immunoassays are pivotal to medical diagnosis and bioanalytical chemistry, the current landscape of public health has catalyzed an important shift in the requirements of immunoassays that demand innovative solutions. For example, rapid, label-free, and low-cost screening of a given analyte is required to inform the best countermeasures to combat infectious diseases in a timely manner. Yet, the current design of immunoassays cannot accommodate such requirements as constraint by accumulative challenges, such as repeated incubation and washing, and the need of two types of antibodies in the sandwich format. To provide a potential solution, herein, a plasmonic Raman immunoassay with single-antibody, multivariate regression, and shift-of-peak strategies, coined as the PRISM assay, for serum biomarkers detection, is reported. The PRISM assay relies on Raman reporter-antibody conjugates to capture analytes on a plasmonic substrate. The ensuing nanomechanical perturbations to vibration of Raman reporters induce subtle but characteristic spectral changes that encode rich information related to the captured analytes. By fusing Raman spectroscopy and chemometric analysis, both Raman frequency shift- and multivariate regression models for sensitive detection of biomarkers are developed. The PRISM assay is expected to find a wide range of applications in clinical diagnosis, food safety surveillance, and environmental monitoring.