Recent advances in biosensing approaches for point-of-care breast cancer diagnostics: challenges and future prospects

Timely and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer is essential for efficient treatment and the best possible survival rates. Biosensors have emerged as a smart diagnostic platform for the detection of biomarkers specific to the onset, recurrence, and therapeutic drug monitoring of breast cancer. There have been exciting recent developments, including significant improvements in the validation, sensitivity, specificity, and integration of sample processing steps to develop point-of-care (POC) integrated micro-total analysis systems for clinical settings. The present review highlights various biosensing modalities (electrical, optical, piezoelectric, mass, and acoustic sensing). It provides deep insights into their design principles, signal amplification strategies, and comparative performance analysis. Finally, this review emphasizes the status of existing integrated micro-total analysis systems (mu-TAS) for personalized breast cancer therapeutics and associated challenges and outlines the approach required to realize their successful translation into clinical settings.

Automated summary

Biosensors play a crucial role in timely and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer by detecting specific biomarkers associated with the disease. Recent advancements have focused on improving validation, sensitivity, and integrating sample processing steps for the development of integrated micro-total analysis systems in clinical settings. Electrical, optical, piezoelectric, mass, and acoustic sensing modalities have been highlighted for their design principles and comparative performance analysis in personalized breast cancer theranostics.