AFP peptide

The rapid detection of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) in serum is of great significance in the early diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). A novel six-channel microfluidic SERS chip integrated with Ag/Au nanocomposites (NCs) for rapid SERS identification of AFP in serum was proposed in this work. Automatic injection was realized by negative pressure formed by specially designed PDMS module on the SERS chip. The serum samples originating from 60 HCC patients and 60 healthy people were measured by SERS on the designed microchip under the optimized conditions. The SERS spectra of serum samples from normal people and patients were collected and analyzed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) which separated the characteristic Raman peaks of AFP of the two groups into two distinct clusters. Linear Discriminate Analysis (LDA) based on the PCA generated features differentiated the patients' sera SERS spectra from the normal sera SERS spectra with a classification accuracy of 96.25% and a blind sample test accuracy of 95%. It is shown that the proposed microfludic SERS chip for AFP SERS test in serum can rapidly and efficiently identify HCC patients. It is of great research value and practical prospect in the fields of disease diagnosis and screening.

Background. Early detection appears to be the most effective approach to improve the overall survival of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). We evaluated the potential performance of plasma SEPT9 methylation (mSEPT9) as a noninvasive biomarker for the diagnosis of patients with HCC. Methods. A total of 373 subjects were included, and the group consisted of 104 HCC patients, 95 with an at-risk disease, and 174 healthy controls (HC). The methylation of mSEPT9 was determined using methylation-specific fluorescence quantitative PCR. The diagnostic performance of plasma mSEPT9 for HCC was assessed in a single-blind manner. Results. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve showed that plasma mSEPT9 can be used to detect and discriminate HCC with an area under the ROC curve (AUROC) of 0.961, a sensitivity of 82.7%, and specificity of 96.0% from HC. These results showed that plasma mSEPT9 had better diagnostic performance than serum alpha fetoprotein (AFP) (AUROC 0.881, sensitivity 57.7%, and specificity 98.3%). Similar results were noted in the detection of early-stage HCC. When combined with serum AFP, the sensitivity increased to 91.3% and 87.7% for the detection of HCC and early-stage HCC,respectively. Notably, the levels of plasma mSEPT9 dramatically decreased after surgery (P=0.001). Conclusions. Plasma SEPT9 methylation might serve as a useful and noninvasive biomarker for the diagnosis of HCC and can be used to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of HCC treatment.