Investigation on Developing a Low Cost Microfluidic Platform for Screening Various Types of Cancers Based on Mirna Over Expression

Abstract

Cancer is one of the leading causes of human morbidity and mortality Timely diagnosis is critical to successful treatment and the stage at which the disease is diagnosed determines prognosis Devices for point of care diagnosis are being developed for many life threatening diseases like diabetes however the complexity and diversity of cancer hinders the development of such devices Moreover health monitoring using advanced technology remains inaccessible and unaffordable to majority of the population particularly in developing or underdeveloped economies The objective of this work was to develop and use an affordable microfluidic platform for cancer screening using micro RNA miRNA in the blood as a biomarker To this end a device was designed and developed in which miRNA sequence specific molecular beacon probes are allowed to hybridize to serum miRNA on a microfluidic platform followed by visualization of the result on an easy to use fluorescence detector miRNA 18a and miRNA 21 have been reported to be overexpressed in the blood of patients with retinoblastoma and breast cancer respectively Molecular beacon probes for these miRNAs were used to test the microfluidic device.