SPR Imaging for Clinical Diagnostics

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based detection for clinical applications has attracted significant interest in recent years. Studies have demonstrated the detection of clinically relevant analytes such as prostate-specific antigen [1], C-reactive protein [2] and human ferritin [3] at physiologically relevant concentrations using both commercial and custom SPR-based systems. The commercial market for SPR imagers is competitive and includes instruments from multiple companies including Biacore, IBIS, GWC Technologies, Biosensing Instruments, K-Mac and Lumera (for more companies and websites, see Chapter 3). However, these instruments have generally been designed to target the research market. There is currently no commercial SPR imaging-based instrument on the market that qualifies as a true point-of-care (POC) clinical diagnostic system, i.e. a portable SPR imaging-based detection platform for the rapid, simultaneous measurement of multiple analytes in human samples that could be used in a clinical setting by minimally trained personnel. SPR imaging is well suited for use in a system for detecting clinical analytes for several reasons: