Early Diagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer Using CA 19-9 and LRG-1 Proteins Through Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), or more commonly known as pancreatic cancer, is currently the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$4^{\text {th }}$</tex> leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States mainly due to late diagnosis. The most common methods of detection include CT abdomen, MRI abdomen, endoscopic ultrasound, and fine needle biopsy; however, these procedures have a very low success rate for detecting pancreatic cancer in its early stages. This research project demonstrates a new, reliable, and accurate diagnostic technique that involves utilizing nanotechnology for precision biosensing. Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) is a nano sensing procedure that detects certain chemicals through a plasmonic effect from the surface interaction of molecules on metal nanoparticles. This research uses Carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA-19-9) and Leucine rich alpha 2 glycoprotein 1 (LRG-1) as pancreatic cancer biomarkers. This is because CA-19-9 is the only FDA-approved biomarker for pancreatic cancer, while other studies suggest LRG-1 has an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.936, a value that is excellent for distinguishing between patients with PDAC and normal controls. A <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathrm{p}$</tex>-value of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$&lt; {0.001}$</tex> indicates that the AUC is highly statistically significant. For the highest possible optimization of SERS, CA-19-9 and LRG-1 concentrations are mixed with different sized silver nanoparticles to determine the nanoparticle size that best reacts with the protein solutions, including a concentration and synthetic blood demonstration to ensure experiments closely mimic real-life operations. This innovative application of SERS emphasizes a potentially highly accurate and non-invasive technique that can detect pancreatic cancer in its early stages.