Reliable identification and collection of cells from bodily fluids is of growing interest for monitoring patient response to therapy and for early detection of disease or its recurrence. We describe a detection platform that combines microfluidics with surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) for the identification of individual mammalian cells continuously flowing in a microfluidics channel. A mixture of cancerous and noncancerous prostate cells was incubated with SERS biotags (SBTs) developed and synthesized by us, then injected into a flow-focused microfluidic channel, which forces the cells into a single file. The spectrally rich SBTs are based on a silver nanoparticle dimer core labeled with a Raman-active small reporter molecule paired with an affinity biomolecule, providing a unique barcode whose presence in a composite SERS spectrum can be deconvoluted. Individual cancer cells passing through the focused laser beam were correctly identified among a proportionally larger number of other cells by their Raman signatures. We examine two deconvolution strategies: principal component analysis and classical least-squares. The deconvolution strategies are used to unmix the overall spectrum to determine the relative contributions between two SBT barcodes, where one SBT barcode indicates neuropilin-1 overexpression, while a second SBT barcode is more universal and indicates unspecific binding to a cell's membrane. Highly reliable results were obtained for all of the cell mixture ratios tested, the lowest being 1 in 100 cells.
Keywords: SERS; cancer diagnostics; chemometrics; microfluidics; multiplexed.