Love Wave Sensor for Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen Detection Based on Hydrophilic Molecularly-Imprinted Polymer

Prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) is a biomarker for prostate cancer (PCa), and a specific and reliable detection technique of PSMA is urgently required for PCa early diagnosis. A Love wave sensor has been widely studied for real-time sensing and highly sensitive applications, but the sensing unit needs special handling for selective detection purpose. In this study, we prepared a versatile Love wave sensor functionalized with molecularly-imprinted polymers (MIP), PSMA as the template molecule. To enhance the specific template bindings of MIP in pure aqueous solutions, facile reversible addition/fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) precipitation polymerization (RAFTPP) was used to produce surface hydrophilic polymer brushes on MIP. The presence of hydrophilic polymer brushes on MIP improved its surface hydrophilicity and significantly reduced their hydrophobic interactions with template molecules in pure aqueous media. In detection process, the acoustic delay-line is confederative to a microfluidic chip and inserted in an oscillation loop. The real-time resonance frequency of the MIP-based Love wave sensor to different concentrations of PSMA was investigated. The limit of detection (LOD) for this Love SAW sensor was 0.013 ng mL(−1), which demonstrates that this sensor has outstanding performance in terms of the level of detection.