In recent years, castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) has profoundly impacted the lives of many men, and early diagnosis of medication and illness is crucial. Therefore, a highly efficient detection method of CRPC biomarkers and curing drugs is required. However, the complex and diverse structures of CRPC drugs pose significant challenges for their detection and differentiation. Lanthanide Metal-Organic Frameworks (Ln-MOFs) show great potential for sensing applications due to their intense and characteristic luminescence. In this work, a series of new bimetallic Ln-MOFs (EuxTb1-x-MOF) based luminescent sensor arrays have been developed to identify CRPC drugs, including in mixtures, via principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) methods. These Ln-MOFs are built with a highly conjugated H2L linker (H2L = 5-(4-(triazole-1-yl)phenyl)isophthalic acid) and exhibit robust strong luminescence emissions and high energy transfer efficiencies. More specifically, Eu0.096Tb0.904-MOF (MOF 3) has demonstrated good sensing performances for CRPC curing drugs in real human serum samples. Further, the curing drug hydroxyflutamide has been combined with MOF 3, to construct a robust composite sensing platform MOF 3@Hydroxyflutamide for highly efficient detection of CRPC biomarkers such as androgen receptor (AR) and prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Finally, luminescence lifetime, zeta potential measurements, and density functional theory (DFT) calculations were performed to gain insights into the sensing mechanism.

This article is Open Access

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