Nondestructive discrimination between normal and hematological malignancy cell lines using near-infrared Raman spectroscopy and multivariate analysis

Abstract

An accurate understanding of biomolecular changes in living cells associated with malignant transformation is of paramount importance in early cancer detection. The aim of this study was to apply near-infrared Raman spectroscopy (RS) for differentiating cancer from normal cells. High-quality Raman spectra in the range of 450–1800 cm−1 can be obtained from 31 normal and 64 hematological malignancy cells including 43 CA46 and 21 U266 cells. There were significant differences in Raman spectra between normal and cancer groups, which suggests special changes in the percentage of biomolecules including lipid, nucleic acids and proteins in different cell lines. A diagnostic accuracy of 100% can be achieved by principal components analysis (PCA) combined with linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for classification between cancer and normal cell lines. This exploratory study demonstrates the potential application of the RS technique combined with PCA–LDA as a clinical cell-based biosensor for the noninvasive cancer detection and screening at the molecular level.