Revealing Drug Treatment Effect from the SERS Profiles of Cell Membrane Biomolecules by a Silver Nanoparticle-Based Magnetic Plasmonic Probe

Observing changes in cell morphology and cell membranes is the most direct way to monitor the effect of drug treatment on tumor cells. Here, a surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) approach was developed to directly reveal the fingerprint information on cancer cell membranes under different altered states in response to drugs by using a silver nanoparticle-based magnetic plasmonic (M-AgNPs) probe. The M-AgNP probe can quickly and spontaneously gather over the cell membrane within 5 min. Then, cell membrane fingerprint information was acquired, enabling us to successfully distinguish differences between the normal and apoptotic states before and after drug treatment, according to their SERS spectral profiles. The probe facilitates the identification of drug effects on the cell membrane and in complex biological scenarios. This cell membrane-specific, molecular-level analytical platform offers the advantage of immediate application with no need for membrane pretreatments and is easy to operate. Label-free SERS analysis helps to identify the binding sites of a specific drug due to the spectral variations, which holds great promise for understanding drug targets and has a wide range of potential applications in pharmacodynamics studies.