Multifunctional nanoflower-assisted catalytic hairpin assembly enables extracellular vesicles derived-microRNAs profiling for colorectal cancer diagnosis.

Abstract

The clinical translation of small extracellular vesicle-derived microRNAs (sEV-miRNAs) for early colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnosis is often limited by their low abundance and complexity of biological fluids. Herein, we developed an ultrasensitive electrochemical platform based on multifunctional DNA nanoflower-assisted catalytic hairpin assembly (NF-CHA) for sEV-miRNAs detection. The NF acts as a localized scaffold to accelerate CHA kinetics and load abundant signal reporter. As a result, the NF-CHA strategy enables the platform achieving a limit of detection of 23.65 aM. To improve diagnostic performance, we employed different sEV-miRNAs combination and machine learning (ML) algorithms, achieving an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.996 for distinguishing early-stage CRC from healthy donors in clinical samples. Therefore, the electrochemical platform holds a great promise as a robust tool for CRC early diagnosis.