Microfluidic Electrochemical Detection of Prostate Cancer using Telomerase Activity

ii Prostate cancer has become one of the leading causes of death and the most frequently diagnosed cancer in men, worldwide. It is highly treatable if detected early, but the current screening methods suffer from poor clinical specificity for prostate cancer, leading to unavoidable misdiagnosis and overtreatment. Elevated telomerase activity has been discovered as an indicator of a variety of cancers, including over 92 % of prostate cancers. High clinical specificity of telomerase activity for prostate cancer compared to other prostate anomalies is an important concept promoted in this thesis. To overcome the quantification complexity of current telomerase activity detection techniques, we have designed and demonstrated the TAME assay (Telomerase Activity Measured Electrochemically): a microfluidic biosensor to detect and measure telomerase activity using an electrochemical technique known as E-DNA. Telomerase activity has been successfully correlated to a TAME parameter, TRAP (Telomeric Repeat Amplification Protocol) product concentration, using two E-DNA schemes: ‘signal-off’ and ‘signal-on’. In terms of the E-DNA signal change, telomerase activity and TRAP product concentrations we investigated are linearly correlated, which is promising for prostate cancer screenin