Recent advances in cancer early detection and diagnosis: Role of nucleic acid based aptasensors

Cancer is a complex disease of worldwide concern. Along with an improvement in outcomes, early and sensitive detection of cancer and cancer biomarkers can facilitate an understanding of cancer progression and aid in the development of effective treatment methods. Among the many detection methods available, aptasensors have shown great promise in recognition and identification of cancer cells and their biomarkers. In this review, we summarize the recent advances in optical and microfluidic aptasensors for early detection of cancer, as well as the recent developments in aptamer-based platforms for cancer exosome detection. The aptamer production process and their characterizations are initially introduced, and then the latest optical aptasensors for cancer cell recognition and detection are summarized. Microfluidic aptamer-based technologies for sensitive biomarker and cancer cell detection are then discussed. After that, the detection of cancer exosomes using recent fluorescent, colorimetric, and other approaches is elaborated. Finally, we provide a perspective on the future of aptasensors for cancer detection.