Professor Ji-hwan Song and a joint research team from Konkuk University, Harvard Medical School, and Seoul National University Bundang Hospital developed a next-generation rapid diagnosis technology that can precisely analyze pancreatic cancer markers in the blood in 15 minutes. This achievement was published in the world-renowned academic journal Nature Communications, proving both technical completeness and academic value.

Pancreatic cancer is an incurable disease with extremely low survival rates when discovered because the initial symptoms are so minimal that it is called a ‘silent killer.’ Existing radiological diagnosis or invasive methods imposed a large physical and financial burden on patients, and general blood tests had clear limitations in terms of sensitivity as an early detection tool.

The research team developed a new test method called 'SELFI (Signal-Enhanced Lateral Flow Immunoassay)', a signal amplification type lateral flow immunoassay. SELFI maximizes the 'hot spot' effect by utilizing a nanostructure in which gold nanoparticles are highly assembled on the surface of silica nanoparticles, improving detection sensitivity by approximately 28 times compared to existing rapid diagnostic kits. Through this, the pancreatic cancer marker 'CA19-9' can be detected at a level of 0.15 U/mL, and the analysis time is only 15 minutes.