LIQUID BIOPSY FOR ORAL CANCER SCREENING USING SUPERHYDROPHOBIC SURFACE ENHANCED RAMAN PLASMONIC DROPLET ASSAY

The spectroscopy based techniques are emerging up as promising techniques for the early detection and screening of different types of cancers (e.g. Oral, breast, cervical etc.). Among them, Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy(SERS) based analysis of body fluids can represent an alternative of tissue biopsy which is called as optical liquid biopsy. This single center observational study mainly aims the development of a portable device based on optical SERS spectroscopic technique for the molecular fingerprinting of microliters of diluted body fluids such as saliva and blood for detecting oral cancer at an earlier stage. Also, the superhydrophobic plasmonic array offers some advantages such as minimum requirement of sample as well as the concentration enhancement of analytes. In addition to this, the usage of different multivariate statistical analysis tools will help us differentiating the spectroscopic data into different datasets. The developed system for the early screening of oral cancer will be highly beneficial to the society to bring down the cervical cancer mortality rate.