Sensitive and selective detection of Mucin1 in pancreatic cancer using hybridization chain reaction with the assistance of Fe₃O₄@polydopamine nanocomposites

Pancreatic cancer is characterized as the worst for diagnosis lacking symptoms at the early stage, which results in a low overall survival rate. The frequently used techniques for pancreatic cancer diagnosis rely on imaging and biopsy, which have limitations in requiring experienced personnel to operate the expensive instruments and analyze the results. Therefore, there is a high demand to develop alternative tools or methods to detect pancreatic cancer. Herein, we propose a new strategy to enhance the detection sensitivity of pancreatic cancer cells both in biofluids and on tissues by combining the unique property of dopamine coated Fe₃O₄ nanoparticles (Fe₃O₄@DOP NPs) to specifically quench and separate free 6-carboxyfluorescein (FAM) labeled DNA (H₁-FAM/H₂-FAM), and the key feature of hybridization chain reaction (HCR) amplification. We have determined the limit of detection (LOD) to be 21 ~ 41 cells/mL for three different pancreatic cancer cell lines. It was also discovered that the fluorescence intensity of pancreatic cancer cells was significantly higher than that of HPDE-C7 and HepG-2 cells (control cell lines), which express lower MUC1 protein. Moreover, the HCR amplification system was used to identify the cancer cells on pancreatic tissue, which indicated the versatility of our strategy in clinical application. Therefore, the presented detection strategy shows good sensitivity, specificity and has great potential for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].