Electrochemical analysis of nucleic acids as potential cancer biomarkers

In recent years, a huge progress has been made regarding the development of electrochemical (EC) assays for detection of nucleic acids - DNA or RNA - as potential cancer bio-markers. Various ingenious strategies for determination of DNA methylation of gene promoters, circulating tumor DNAs, viral nucleic acids, or short noncoding microRNAs were presented, many of them showing remarkable sensitivities. However, a majority of these assays were not applied into clinical samples from patients, which is crucial should the electrochemistry compete with conventional, routinely used techniques. In this review, we critically evaluate strengths and weaknesses of EC assays that recognized this necessity and successfully determined endogenous DNA or RNA in patient samples with various forms of tumors.