Accurate diagnosis of triple-negative breast cancer enables temperature-compensation all optical microfibre gratings...

Accurate clinical diagnosis of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) usually needed tedious, time consuming, high-cost tissue section analyzation procedures by using conventional clinical medical approaches. Thus, it is an urgent to develop low-cost, rapid, high-sensitivity TNBC diagnostic approaches. Herein, we have proposed a temperature-compensation short-period microfiber long-period grating (MFLPG) sensor coated with Au nanostars (Au NS)-Nb₂CT_X MXene coupled with localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) effect for the high-sensitivity tracking tumor-derived exosomal programmed cell death ligand-1 (PD-L1) in collected clinical human samples. For sensing exosomes particles in pure phosphate buffered saline (PBS) solution, the sensor device could exhibit an ultra-high detection sensitivity of 0.852 nm/log₁₀ (particles/mL), and an ultra-low limit-of-detection (LOD) of 12.9 particles/mL within the exosomes concentration ranging from 10¹ particles/mL to 10⁸ particles/mL. More significantly, the MFLPG sensor could differentiate breast cancer patients from healthy controls, and it could also differentiate TNBC patients from some other non-TNBC patients' samples. Therefore, this work could pave a new method for rapid, high-sensitivity and accurate diagnosis of TNBC in clinical samples.