Cancer Biomarker Detection in a Portable, Automated, Multi-Channel Magnetofluidic Platform

Early diagnosis is crucial to improving clinical outcomes for cancer, but conventional detection methods have limited accessibility in resource-constrained settings, where the need for early cancer detection is the most pressing. Particularly characterized by extremely low survival rates, esophageal cancer is among the most prevalent cancers in low- and middle-income countries. As a prospective method for detecting esophageal cancer earlier in resource-constrained settings, we introduce the Automated Cartridge-based Cancer Early Screening System (ACCESS), a compact platform designed to automate droplet magnetofluidic-based assays for detecting DNA methylation biomarkers. We demonstrate, for the first time, simultaneous detection of multiple methylation biomarkers from eight clinical tissue samples in an automated, parallelized, portable, and point-of-care-amenable platform. The promising initial results underscore the potential of ACCESS as a useful diagnostic tool for esophageal cancer in resourced-constrained settings in the near future.