SERS-based liquid biopsy of saliva and serum from patients with Sjogren's syndrome

In this preliminary study, we employed surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) of saliva and serum samples for diagnosing Sjogren's syndrome (SjS), a systemic autoimmune disease characterized by dryness of the mouth and eyes. The saliva and serum samples from n = 29 patients with SjS and n = 21 controls were deproteinized with methanol and then the SERS spectra were acquired using silver nanoparticles synthesized by reduction with hydroxylamine hydrochloride. In the case of both saliva and serum, the SERS spectra were dominated by similar bands attributed to purine metabolites such as uric acid, xanthine, and hypoxanthine. Principal component analysis-linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) models built from SERS spectra of saliva and serum yielded an overall classification accuracy of 94% and 98%, respectively. These results suggest that the SERS analysis of saliva and serum is able to capture the complex biochemical perturbations that accompany the onset of SjS, a strategy which could be translated in the future into a novel point-of-care diagnosis method.