Pancreatic cancer is the fourth-leading cause of cancer related mortality and is predicted to be the second leading cause of cancer death by 2030. The 5-year survival rate has not changed over the past four decades due to lack of specific therapies and inability to detect it early. Several years often elapses from the beginning of the disease to the patient’s diagnosis, suggesting a window of opportunity for early detection. Recently, tiny nanometre-sized vesicles (exosomes) shed by the tumour in the bloodstream, have emerged as powerful circulating biomarkers possessing extremely high sensitivity and specificity, thus paving the way for a new era of non-invasive cancer diagnostics. However, currently the process of exosome isolation and detection is not only highly inefficient, but also technically challenging and inaccessible to hospital laboratories, clinical facilities and resource-poor settings. To address technological constraints of exosome utilisation, we have designed a microfluidic device that combines two modules: (i) An isolation module to separate exosomes from blood, and (ii) a detection module based on a graphene biosensor to simultaneously detect and capture these exosomes. The functionalised graphene based sensor, which can detect exosomes at 0.0001 g/L, has not been used before for exosome sensing in medicine or other research settings. Therefore, this could be a suitable tool for exosome detection as biomarkers in cancer diagnostics.
