Recent advances in SPR and SERS for sensitive translational medical diagnostics

Abstract Personalized medicine is revolutionizing modern health care. The aim of personalized diagnostics is to provide rapid, portable and simple tests that will reduce diagnosis time. They enable rapid analysis performed near the patient and provide specific details of the patient’s condition so that a personalized treatment can be made. This review focuses on the recent advances in optical diagnostic techniques based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectroscopy (SERS) for translational medical diagnostics. In the first part, recent developments in SPR biosensors for infectious disease diagnosis are presented including the first two-dimensional multiplex influenza SPR biosensor for H1N1 (influenza A) and H3N2 (seasonal influenza) detection. In the second part, advances in SERS, which is another ultra-sensitive optical diagnostic technique for various cancer detection applications in pre-clinical and clinical settings, are reviewed.