Nanomaterials for Molecular Detection and Analysis of Extracellular Vesicles.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have emerged as a novel resource of biomarkers for cancer and certain other diseases. Probing EVs in body fluids has become of major interest in the past decade in the development of a new-generation liquid biopsy for cancer diagnosis and monitoring. However, sensitive and specific molecular detection and analysis are challenging, due to the small size of EVs, low amount of antigens on individual EVs, and the complex biofluid matrix.

Gold Nanorod-Assisted Photothermal Therapy and Improvement Strategies.

Noble metal nanoparticles have been sought after in cancer nanomedicine during the past two decades, owing to the unique localized surface plasmon resonance that induces strong absorption and scattering properties of the nanoparticles. A popular application of noble metal nanoparticles is photothermal therapy, which destroys cancer cells by heat generated by laser irradiation of the nanoparticles. Gold nanorods have stood out as one of the major types of noble metal nanoparticles for photothermal therapy due to the facile tuning of their optical properties in the tissue penetrative near infrared region, strong photothermal conversion efficiency, and long blood circulation half-life after surface modification with stealthy polymers.

Immunomagnetic Capture and Multiplexed Surface Marker Detection of Circulating Tumor Cells with Magnetic Multicolor Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Nanotags.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have substantial clinical implications in cancer diagnosis and monitoring. Although significant progress has been made in developing technologies for CTC detection and counting, the ability to quantitatively detect multiple surface protein markers on individual tumor cells remains very limited. In this work, we report a multiplexed method that uses magnetic multicolor surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) nanotags in conjunction with a chip-based immunomagnetic separation to quantitatively and simultaneously detect four surface protein markers on individual tumor cells in whole blood.