Ultrasensitive electrochemical immunosensor for oral cancer biomarker IL-6 using carbon nanotube forest electrodes and multilabel amplification.

Squamous cell carcinomas of head and neck (HNSCC) are associated with immune, inflammatory, and angiogenic responses involving interleukin-6 (IL-6). This article reports an ultrasensitive electrochemical immunosensor for human IL-6 and proof-of-concept studies of IL-6 detection in HNSCC cells. Single wall carbon nanotube (SWNT) forests with attached capture antibodies (Ab(1)) for IL-6 were used in an electrochemical sandwich immunoassay protocol using enzyme label horseradish peroxidase (HRP) to measure very low (