Cancer biomarkers and their biosensors: A comprehensive review

The article starts with a brief history of discovery of cancer biomarkers followed by statistical data on published cancer biomarkers detection strategies in the last decade to demonstrate the latest trends and the necessity to develop sensitive, cost-effective, and portable monitoring systems for these purposes to monitor wide spectrum of biomarkers. The latter part contains a short description of various optical and colorimetric detection methods while focusing more on the utilization of electrochemical detection methods and their signal amplification strategies. This part shows that the current state of knowledge is still limited and there is an ample need for biosensors that can rapidly analyze cellular modifications to identify biomarkers associated with cancer for enhancing the prognosis and therapy options. Finally, different approaches employed to overcome the limitations of existing electrochemical methods for cancer biomarker detection are critically discussed while highlighting the existing challenges and future opportunities.