Chemiluminescence, i.e. the emission of light from a chemical reaction, offers interesting opportunities for developing point-of-care biosensors. However, commercially available systems are expensive, bulky, and primarily addressed to laboratory usage. The goal of this paper is to present a novel work related to the design and experimental validation of a point-of-care device for cancer marker detection in human serum. The new system has been especially developed for cost-sensitive applications using only low-cost off-the-shelf components. The system was tested with blood serum. The output signal from spots with specific proteins uptake was two orders of magnitude higher than that from control spots: it was 14 +/- 3 mV/s from the detection spots, while it was only 260 mu V/s and 242 mu V/s from the control spots. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.