Picomolar detection of carcinoembryonic antigen in whole blood using microfluidics and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) is a wide-spectrum biomarker. Clinically, we generally use serum sample to detect CEA, which needs to be centrifuged to pretreat the raw blood sample. In this study, we realized direct CEA detection in raw blood samples exploiting microfluidics. The LOD was as low as 10(-12) M.