A facile gold nanoparticle–based ELISA system for detection of osteopontin in saliva: Towards oral cancer diagnostics

In the current study, we emphasize that osteopontin is overexpressed in oral squamous cell carcinoma. Overexpression of osteopontin levels was confirmed by mRNA quantification studies and immunohistochemistry analysis. Based on this, a gold nanoparticle–based ELISA system was developed for non-invasive osteopontin detection. The incorporation of AuNRs (Gold nanorods) or AuNSs (Gold nanospheres) in the conventional ELISA improved the sensitivity of analyses. A considerably lowered detection limit in case of AuNR (detection limit: 0.02 ng mL− 1) and AuNS (detection limit: 0.03 ng mL− 1) modified assay was obtained as compared to commercially available OPN ELISA kit (detection limit: 0.14 ng mL− 1). The modified ELISA had a wide linear detection range (0.31–20 ng mL− 1), good reproducibility, and specificity against the tested interferents in the saliva. Finally, the nanoELISA was validated with osteopontin spiked in artificial and normal saliva samples and observed to show good recovery (95.4–97.85%), which indicates the application potential of the developed kit for real sample analysis.