Nano Sensing for Early Diagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic Cancer is becoming the second leading cause of cancer deaths, mainly attributed to late diagnosis. Surgical resection remains the only plausible treatment for curing patients of this cancer, but this is only possible when the cancer is localized making early detection vital. Currently, the most common early diagnostic method is the tri-phasic pancreatic-protocol CT scan. This method however has a low accuracy and specificity making it an ineffective early diagnostic. This purpose of this research was to develop a non-invasive, fast, and highly sensitive early diagnostic method for pancreatic cancer through the applications of nanotechnology. Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) is an innovative nano sensing method which results from plasmonic effect through molecules interacting with the surface of metal nanoparticles. This is a new method for trace biomarker detections and shows great potential to be an early nano-diagnostic method for Pancreatic cancer. This project uses Leucine as a biomarker for the demonstration of SERS for early pancreatic cancer detection. This is because recent studies show that Leucine has linked its overexpression with pancreatic cancer; studies have found a specificity of 100% with the use of Leucine and early diagnosis 2 to 5 years earlier than current diagnostic methods for pancreatic cancer. The parameters for SERS enhancement were optimized for the detection of Leucine using 20 nm Ag NPs. Predictive curves with linear fits were generated from an analysis of feature peaks giving the highest sensitivity for trace concentrations. This new finding shows the promising development of an early diagnostic method that is non-invasive, efficient and highly accurate for pancreatic cancer through SERS nano sensing. ### Competing Interest Statement This paper was developed by the sponsorship of intern research training to students in the summer of 2022 through the financial support of scholarship to the first author, Sidarth Krishna. AARD is the sponsor. Dr. Zeng is the PI for this project. ### Funding Statement This primary study was patially funded by the Academy for Advanced Research and Development (AARD) though scholarship of the Future Scholars from AARD for the first author. ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable. Yes The research does not involve any clinic trails nor animal models and no human patient data used. All checmicals were from Sigma aldrich. All data are Raman spectroscopy. They are available as requests.