Spectroscopic Analysis of Live Cancer Cell Microenvironment with Terahertz Metasurface Biosensing Platform

Abstract

Due to its versatile onset mechanism and symptoms, accurate diagnosis of cancer is consistently in demand. Recently, various biochemical analysis such as fluorescence, electrochemical and immunoassay has paved the way down to single molecular scale. However, multifaceted onset and development mechanism of cancer requires multi-pronged strategies and persistent observation for accurate cancer diagnosis. Comprehensive cancer sensing, which indicates recognition of multiple contributors such as cancer biomarker and its favorable microenvironment, provides increased level of reliability for cancer detection methods. In this study, terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) and metasurface were used to implement comprehensive cancer sensing method. To achieve comprehensive detection, metabolic cancer biomarker and acidic cancer microenvironment were inspected at the same time.