Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy for tumor nucleic acid: Towards cancer diagnosis and precision medicine

Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide. Early diagnosis and personalization of treatment have become effective routes to control the increasing mortality rate. Since cancer is a genetic disease, there is a great demand for novel techniques to detect tumor nucleic acids (NAs) with increased sensitivity. In recent years, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) emerged as a popular technique for biosensing in cancer theranostics. Combined with molecular probes, SERS allows ultrasensitive and multiplex detection of tumor-derived NAs, with great potential for clinical cancer detection and subtyping. In this review, we summarize and compare the various strategies for designing SERS-based NA sensors, focusing on the mechanism of sensing, followed by their representative applications to cancer theranostics in recent 5 years, as well as future challenges for clinical translation. The review is aimed to provide basic guidelines for engineering SERS-based NA sensors, according to the specific clinical cancer application.