Pancreatic cancer is notoriously silent, and by the time symptoms appear the five-year survival rate for advanced disease is around 3 per cent. A team at the Universidade de São Paulo's São Carlos Institute of Physics has developed a biosensor aimed squarely at that diagnostic gap: a device that detects CA19-9, a biomarker associated with pancreatic tumours, at low concentrations in blood and returns a result in roughly ten minutes.
The sensor, described in the journal ACS Omega, works by measuring changes in capacitance on an electrode surface as immobilised antibodies capture CA19-9 molecules. In validation against 24 blood samples from patients at different disease stages and from a control group, it produced results statistically similar to those of the conventional ELISA test, which requires laboratory infrastructure and considerably longer processing.
The work is early stage, and the team's next steps include testing blood, saliva and urine samples from the hospital of USP's Ribeirão Preto medical school. The group is also building two further sensors and a machine-learning tool it calls a bioelectronic tongue, designed to read multiple biomarkers at once. If the platform holds up in larger cohorts, it could bring rapid, low-cost screening for a lethal cancer within reach of clinics that will never own an ELISA line.