Sucrose-Powered Liposome Nanosensors for Urinary Glucometer-Based Monitoring of Cancer.

Abstract

Timely detection of early-stage cancer holds immense potential in enhancing prognostic outcomes. There is an increasing desire for versatile tools to enable simple, sensitive, and cost-effective cancer detection. By exploiting the extraintestinal metabolic inertness and efficiency renal clearance of sucrose, we designed a liposome nanosensor using sucrose as a messenger to convert tumor-specific esterase activity into glucose meter readout, enabling economical and sensitive uri-nalysis for cancer detection in point-of-care testing (POCT). Our results demonstrate that the nanosensors exhibited sig-nificant signal differences between tumor-bearing and healthy mice in both orthotopic and metastatic tumor models. Ad-ditionally, efficient elimination of the nanosensors through the hepatobiliary pathway was observed with no significant toxicity. Such a non-invasive diagnostic modality significantly assists in personalized pharmacological treatment and fol-low-up efficacy assessment. We envision that this modular liposome nanosensor platform might be applied for economi-cally detecting diverse diseases via a simple urinary test.