Recent Advances and Emerging Trends in Cancer Biomarker Detection Technologies

Cancer is a major global health burden and poor survival rates can be attributed to lack of early diagnosis and limited access to timely and standard treatments. Significant progress has been made in recent years to establish reliable, cost-effective, and powerful cancer diagnostics. This review presents the recent advances (mostly after 2018) in cancer diagnostic technologies with a prime focus on the various types of biomarkers investigated, such as nucleic acids, proteins, enzymes, and even entire cancer cells, typically known as circulating tumor cells (CTCs). It elucidates several seminal works that utilize a multidisciplinary approach to cancer diagnostics as an alternative to traditional screening methods. Different detection techniques used for each biomarker type have been comprehensively reviewed and our goal is to provide the reader with a critical overview of the current sense and sensibility in the field of cancer biosensing. Furthermore, we discuss emerging trends in cancer biomarker detection using novel multiplexed and integrated platforms for accurate and easy readout, while also shedding light on their technical limitations and existing challenges in achieving high sensitivity and selectivity. We hope that this work will promote collaborative research among different disciplines with an ultimate goal of achieving personalized and user-friendly point-of-care technologies that enable early cancer diagnosis and significantly reduced cancer mortality.