Photoacoustic detection of gold nanorods tagged prostate cancer cells in-vitro

Our recent efforts are to develop a system for the detection of extremely low number of prostate cancer cells tagged to gold nanorods. Such a system provides an attractive platform to detect the early metastasis. By monitoring the metastatic prostate cancer cells, the physicians are provided with more time to act and design the treatment and also provide better hope for the prostate cancer patients. We developed an optical flowmetry system which employs photoacoustic excitation coupled with an optical transducer capable of determining the presence of cells within the circulating system in vitro. The particles were tagged to gold nanoparticles at Dr. Katti's lab. This provided the required optical contrast to detect the individual prostate cancer cells. Detection trials resulted in a detection threshold of the order of a couple of individual cells in the detection volume, thus validating the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.