A novel microfluidic chip system for the simultaneous detection of protein and nucleic acid biomarkers in ovarian cancer

Simultaneous analysis of multiple protein and nucleic acid biomarkers in one clinical sample can provide clinically valuable results for the diagnosis, monitoring, and management of diseases. However, current diagnostic platforms primarily rely on the independent detection of proteins and nucleic acids, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this study, we propose a microfluidic chip system that integrates microfluidic molecular Point-of-Care Testing (POCT) technology and microfluidic homogeneous chemiluminescence analysis (CLIA) technology for simultaneous detection of protein and nucleic acid biomarkers of ovarian cancer (OC). The integrated system shows good detection limits of 10 fM for miR-92a and 15 pM for HE4. In primary clinical tests with human samples, the diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of the simultaneous detection of two biomarkers (miR-92a and HE4) for OC were 100 % and 96.1 %, respectively, and the area under the curve (AUC) was 0.996. Therefore, the combined evaluation of multiple biomarkers of different dimensions can improve the specificity and sensitivity of diagnosis. This system can also be applied to other tumor markers and biomarkers in other fields of diseases, offering a broad spectrum of diagnostic capabilities.