Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistor Biosensor with an Enlarged Gate Area for Ultra-Sensitive Detection of a Lung Cancer Biomarker

Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) is a recognized biomarker for lung cancer and can be used for early detection. However, the clinical value of CEA is not fully realized due to the rigorous requirement for high-sensitivity and wide-range detection methods. Field-effect transistor (FET) biosensors, as one of the potentially powerful platforms, may detect CEA with a significantly higher sensitivity than conventional clinical testing equipment, while their sensitivity and detection range for CEA are far below the requirement for early detection. Here, we construct a floating gate FET biosensor to detect CEA based on a semiconducting carbon nanotube (CNT) film combined with an undulating yttrium oxide (Y2O3) dielectric layer as the biosensing interface. Utilizing an undulating biosensing interface, the proposed device showed a wider detection range and optimized sensitivity and detection limit, which benefited from an increase of probe-binding sites on the sensing interface and an increase of electric double-layer capacitance, respectively. The outcomes of analytical studies confirm that the undulating Y2O3 provided the desired biosensing surface for probe immobilization and performance optimization of a CNT-FET biosensor toward CEA including a wide detection range from 1 fg/mL to 1 ng/mL, good linearity, and high sensitivity of 72 ag/mL. More crucially, the sensing platform can function normally in the complicated environment of fetal bovine serum, indicating its great promise for early lung cancer screening.