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Development of Microcantilever Sensors for Liver Cancer Detection

Jingjing Wang, Yinfang Zhu, Jinying Zhang and Jinling Yang

Recently, microcantilever-based technologies are playing more and more important roles in early diagnosis of cancer due to their high sensitivity, fast response, low cost, small reagent consumption, portability, real-time, labelfree detection, and so on. However, in conventional cantilever sensors working on mass-loading principle, the change of stiffness coefficient k is neglected. This results in distinct error for mass detection. Some researchers tried a local immobilization method to eliminate the undesired effect of k. But the change of k in this method still brings unexpected error. An accurate theoretical model is needed to take the effect of k change into account in the local immobilization approach. A micro-cavity was designed in the free end of the cantilever for local antibody immobilization in our work, thus the adsorption-induced variation of k can be dramatically reduced compared to that caused by adsorption of the whole lever. In addition, an analytical model has been established to eliminate the effect of adsorption-induced lever stiffness change and has been applied to precise mass detection of cancer biomarker AFP, the detected AFP antigen mass (7.6 pg/ml) is close to the calculated one (5.5 pg/ml), two orders of magnitude better than the value by the fully antibody-immobilized cantilever sensor. These approaches will promote clinical application of the cantilever sensors in early diagnosis of cancer.