A magnetic surface-enhanced Raman scattering platform for performing successive breast cancer exosome isolation and analysis.

The rapid development of exosome research provides new insights into the physiological role of exosomes and their significant correlation with human health. Although the exosomes derived from tumor sources have been proven to be promising biomarkers for cancer detection and disease progression due to their inherited biological contents from the parent cancer cells and unique roles in tumor metastasis and invasion, it is still a challenging task to perform rapid and effective isolation from complex biological samples and conduct high-precision real-time analysis. Herein, we propose a magnetic surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) platform to integrate successive breast cancer exosome isolation and Raman signal enhancement into one system to achieve the goal. In addition, principal component analysis (PCA) was conducted to investigate major patterns of the samples. According to the results, the magnetic SERS platform can be applied to distinguish exosomes derived from MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cells with 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity for the 95% confidence interval. More importantly, this platform can fully identify breast cancer patients and healthy people with 91.67% sensitivity and 100% specificity. These studies revealed that our magnetic SERS platform would serve as a great potential system for highly efficient real-time liquid biopsy by using the exosomes as cancerous markers, while exempting from pre-treatment of clinical samples or the extra introduction of elements for SERS signal enhancement.