Spectral analysis of cancer biomarkers in human serum using a custom portable analyzer

In this study, we systematically evaluate metabolites and proteins in blood to develop a pipeline to identify potential biomarkers for breast cancer risk. Our aim is to identify a group of molecules, which can be targeted in the design of portable and low-cost blood biomarker detection devices. We obtained plasma samples from women who were cancer free and women who were cancer free at the time of blood collection but developed breast cancer later. Potential prognostic biomarkers for breast cancer risk were extracted from plasma metabolomics and proteomics data using statistical and discriminative power analyses. One of these biomarkers was validated by independent biological measurements. These biomarkers can be used to develop low-cost screening methods towards early diagnosis and hence decreased mortality due to breast cancer. As a low-cost biomarker screening solution, we proposed a Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometer-based spectroscopic biomarker analysis setup to quantitatively detect specific molecules in their environments. We used commercial Fabry-Perot interferometers and their evaluation board, which takes the output of the interferometers and process it to make the measurements readable and interpretable. For the surface on which we drop our samples for the measurements, we used Calcium Fluoride (CaF2) windows. In addition to hardware parts, we used a reconstruction method on computer generated spectra to overcome the inherited blurring problem of our interferometers.