Abstract
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has a relatively low incidence but a high mortality rate, primarily due to difficulties in early detection. Current state-of-the-art methods for diagnosing early-stage PDAC tend to be invasive, time-consuming, and unreliable, primarily due to the difficulties associated with the early detection of pancreatic cancers. Here we show a quick and sensitive method for the early diagnosis of PDAC using a signal-enhanced lateral flow immunoassay called SELFI. We develop SELFI, which generates a strong colorimetric signal through multiple hotspots formed by plasmonic gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) assembled on a silica nanoparticle. Our SELFI assay achieves a 10,123-fold increase in the limit of detection compared to conventional lateral flow immunoassays using 20 nm AuNPs, providing results within 15 min. We demonstrate that SELFI enables early diagnosis of PDAC, as indicated by a receiver operating characteristic curve and a larger area under the curve compared to the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. SELFI’s effective diagnostic features can enhance the timely identification of PDAC and may also serve in the early diagnosis of a range of other diseases.
Data availability
The processed quantitative data generated in this study, including assay readouts and data used for statistical and ROC analyses, are provided in the Supplementary Tables associated with this paper. Individual-level clinical data derived from human serum samples are not publicly available due to ethical and legal restrictions related to participant privacy and the terms of informed consent. These data are stored in controlled-access repositories at the Human Bioresource Center of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital. Access to the restricted clinical data may be granted to qualified researchers for non-commercial research purposes, subject to approval by the Human Bioresource Center and the relevant Institutional Review Board. Requests for access should be directed to the corresponding author (Jong-chan Lee; ljc0316@snubh.org), who will coordinate the application process. A response to access requests is typically provided within 2–4 weeks. Data will remain available for the duration permitted by institutional and ethical regulations. Source data for all figures are provided with this paper. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The code used in this study is available at GitHub (https://github.com/JKim-45/SELFI) and has been archived on Zenodo with a https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17958691.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (NRF-2022R1A2C2012883; B.-H.J.), the Bio and Medical Technology Development Program (2021M3C1C3097211; B.-H.J.), the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (RS-2023-00222910; J.-C.L. and B.-H.J., RS-2025-00558156; J.S.), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R01DK133864; L.P.L.).
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S.J., M.S., J.K., and B.-H.J. conceived and designed the experiments. S.J., M.S., J.H., H.-J.B., Y.Y., H.-S.C., K.Y., J.-S.C., J.A., G.A., and J.K. conducted experiments and analyses. J.K. developed custom R scripts for statistical analysis. S.J., M.S., J.H., Y.Y., J.K., J.-C.L., and B.-H.J. wrote the manuscript. S.J., M.S., J.H., H.C., J.-H.H., J.K., J.S., J.-C.L., L.P.L., and B.-H.J. revised the manuscript. L.P.L. and B.-H.J. supervised the overall process. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript. S.J., M.S., and J.H. contributed equally.
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Jang, S., Shin, M., Han, J. et al. Early diagnosis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma by signal-enhanced lateral flow immunoassay: SELFI. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69204-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69204-7
