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Ahmed E, Masud MK, Komatineni P, Dey S, Lobb R, Hossain MSA, Möller A, Yamauchi Y, Sina AAI, Trau M. A mesoporous gold biosensor to investigate immune checkpoint protein heterogeneity in single lung cancer cells. Biosens Bioelectron 2024; 249:115984. [PMID: 38219464 DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2023.115984] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2023] [Revised: 08/30/2023] [Accepted: 12/27/2023] [Indexed: 01/16/2024]
Abstract
Immune checkpoint proteins (ICPs) play a major role in a patient's immune response against cancer. Tumour cells usually express those proteins to communicate with immune cells as a process of escaping the anti-cancer immune response. Detecting the major functional immune checkpoint proteins present on cancer cells (such as circulating tumor cells or CTCs) and examining the heterogeneity in their expression at the single-cell level could play a crucial role in both cancer diagnosis and the monitoring of therapy. In this study, we develop a mesoporous gold biosensor to precisely assess ICP heterogeneity in individual cancer cells within a lung cancer model. The platform utilizes a nanostructured mesoporous gold surface to capture CTCs and a Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) readout to identify and monitor the expression of key ICP proteins (PD-L1, B7H4, CD276, CD80) in lung cancer cells. The homogeneous and abundant pores in mesoporous 3D gold nanostructures enable increased antibody loading on-chip and an enhanced SERS signal, which are key to our single cell capture, and accurate analysis of ICPs in cancer cells with high sensitivity. Our lung cancer cell line model data showed that our method can detect single cells and analyse the expression of four lung cancer associated ICPs on individual cell surfaces during treatment. To show the potential of our mesoporous gold biosensor in analysing clinical samples, we tested 9 longitudinal Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells (PBMC) samples from lung cancer patient before and after therapy. Our mesoporous biosensor successfully captured single CTCs and found that the expression of ICPs in CTCs is highly heterogeneous in both pre-treatment and treated PBMC samples isolated from lung cancer patient blood. We suggest that our findings will help clinicians in selecting the most appropriate therapy for patients.
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Affiliation(s)
- Emtiaz Ahmed
- Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine, Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia
| | - Mostafa Kamal Masud
- Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia
| | - Prathyusha Komatineni
- Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine, Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia
| | - Shuvashis Dey
- Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine, Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia
| | - Richard Lobb
- Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine, Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia
| | - Md Shahriar A Hossain
- Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia; School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology (EAIT), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia
| | - Andreas Möller
- Tumour Microenvironment Laboratory, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Herston, Queensland, 4006, Australia; Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
| | - Yusuke Yamauchi
- Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia; Department of Materials Process Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, 464-8603, Japan
| | - Abu Ali Ibn Sina
- Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine, Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia.
| | - Matt Trau
- Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine, Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), Corner College and Cooper Roads (Bldg 75), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia; School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia.
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