Studies On Novel Piezoelectric Immunosensing Techniques For The Diagnosis Of Leukemia And Other Serious Diseases

Acute leukemia immunophenotype, which utilizes antibodies (usually monoclonal) to specifically recognize various differentiated leukocytes for defining certain phenotypic lineages or subsets of acute leukemias, is of particular importance for the clinical diagnosis, therapy, prognosis and pathogeny of the malignant cancers. The clinical immunophenotyping methods now being in use, however, are generally complicated, time-consuming, lowly quantitative, and necessary for expensive instrumentation and technical skills, which are applied to date in very few laboratories. Accordingly, exploring some immunosensing methodologies for phenotyping acute leukemias that are simple, cost-effective, quantifiable and easy to be clinically popularized is of considerable interest. Moreover, recent years witness the wilful persecution of some zoonosises to human beings, especially the resurgence of parasitosises previously controlled in the epidemic areas, most representative as Schistosomiasis and Toxoplasmosis. The two kinds of parasite diseases that are highly prevalent and do great harms to human health have become a serious global health problem to be solved. The present assays used for the clinical parasitosis diagnosis are still lowly sensitive or complicated and time-consuming, and far from meeting the needs of the burdensome works in the prevention and therapy of the parasite diseases. Therefore, the development of some diagnostic techniques that are rapid, sensitive, and suitable for field applications and epidemic situation monitoring is a similarly urgent and significant target to pursue.Use of chemo/biosensing techniques to detect the meaningful bio-markers for the accurate and rapid diagnosis of clinical diseases as well as for the field screening and mass monitoring of the epidemic diseases has been a novel, attractive and hot topic in the current medical studies. Piezoelectric TSM immunosensing technique, which incorporates high sensitivity of piezoelectric response and high specificity of antibody-antigen immunoreaction, is sensitive to multiple signals such as the surface mass, and the density, viscosity, conductivity, and dielectric effect of the test solution. It may present some outstanding advantages including desirable simplicity, high sensitivity, rapid response, wide detection range, effective cost, real-time digital output, and free from tracer labeling and sample purification etc. This kind technique may breakthrough some bottlenecks of the traditional analytical methodologies, showing an attractive future of potential applications in the biochemical diagnosis of clinicaldiseases. This dissertation focuses on developing a series of piezoelectric immunosensing techniques for the diagnosis of some clinical serious diseases including acute leukemia, Toxoplasmosis, Schistosomiasis, Wilson, virulent anaemia and serious liverish diseases etc. by probing their specific markers (sometimes as the model test reagents). On the one hand, the diagnostic piezo-immunosensing probes or array are fabricated by use of various biomolecular immobilization methodologies developed by selectively incorporating three newly emerged techniques of the plasma-polymerized film (PPF) deposition technique, the nanoparticle-enhanced biomolecular modification technique and the polyelectrolyte self-assembly adsorption technique. On the other hand, based on the nanoparticle-based immunoagglutination theory and the non-mass piezosensing effects, a novel piezo-immunosensing system for disease-associated markers has been proposed initially using functionalized nano-sized (or submicron) particles as replacements of the traditional latex for loading the immunorecognization molecules. Moreover, monoclonal antibodies are labeled onto the core-shell magnetic particles for immuno-enrichment of antigen targets by the adscititious magnetic field, resulting in an automatic sensitive immunosensing technique. The detailed materials are shown as follows:(1) An integrated piezoelectric immunosensor array has been developed for the first time to detect the dif...