Detection of foodborne pathogens at an early stage is very important to control food quality and improve medical response. Rapid detection of foodborne pathogens with high sensitivity and specificity is becoming an urgent requirement in health safety, medical diagnostics, environmental safety, and controlling food quality. Despite the existing bacterial detection methods being reliable and widely used, these methods are time-consuming, expensive, and cumbersome. Therefore, researchers are trying to find new methods by integrating spectroscopy techniques with artificial intelligence and advanced materials. Within this progress report, advances in the detection of foodborne pathogens using spectroscopy techniques are discussed. This paper presents an overview of the progress and application of spectroscopy techniques for the detection of foodborne pathogens, particularly new trends in the past few years, including surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, surface plasmon resonance, fluorescence spectroscopy, multiangle laser light scattering, and imaging analysis. In addition, the applications of artificial intelligence, microfluidics, smartphone-based techniques, and advanced materials related to spectroscopy for the detection of bacterial pathogens are discussed. Finally, we conclude and discuss possible research prospects in aspects of spectroscopy techniques for the identification and classification of pathogens.

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a significant public health problem worldwide. Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) is the principle marker for laboratory testing of HBV, but the rapid identification of HBsAg is challenging in a resource-limited setting. Antibodies to HBsAg (Anti-HBs) levels are measured as markers for an immune response to vaccination as well as for decision making for specific treatment against Hepatitis-B. This research developed a prototype for the rapid detection of HBsAg using immunomagnetic separation, dynamic light scattering, and support vector machine. Magnetic beads coated with polyclonal anti-HBsAg were used to isolate HBsAg from the sample. The performance characteristics of quantitative real-time detection of HBsAg were characterized under optimized conditions. Twelve photodetectors were arranged on four concentric curvatures at different angles. The photodetectors were positioned around the sample flask in forward direction. The prototype acquires the real-time laser scattering light from the sample, and the noise was removed. The power spectral features were extracted from the acquired signal. Support vector machines (SVM) were used for training a classification algorithm by using extracted features. The overall classification accuracy for the identification of HBsAg was 87.7%. The HBsAg detection test was also performed on 20 serum specimens, with 10 serum samples were positive for HBsAg and 10 were healthy control subjects. The test had a dynamic range of 98.86 IU/mL to 3163.5 IU/mL. Results of HBsAg detection agreed completely with those of conventional Chemiluminescence Immunoassay (CLIA). In conclusion, the proposed HBsAg detection method can differentiate the sample that contains HBsAg enriched IM beads and blank IM beads.

With the advancement in the mechanism of immune surveillance and immune evasion in cancer cells, cancer immunotherapy shows promising results for treating cancer with established efficacy and less toxicity. As a result of the off-target effect, the approach for delivering vaccines, adjuvants, or antibodies directly to tumor sites is gaining widespread attention. An effective alternative is to utilize nanoengineered particles, functioning as drug-delivery systems or as antigens themselves. This article reviews the practical implementation of nanotechnology in cancer immunotherapy.