Recent Progress on Nanomaterial-Facilitated Electrochemical Strategies for Cancer Diagnosis.

Cancer is a malignant disease that endangers human life, especially owing to its high fatality rate; therefore, rapid and accurate early screening is needed to effectively improve the survival rate. Compared with traditional cancer detection methods, electrochemical biosensors that recognize cancer biomarkers in blood have the advantages of low invasiveness, fast diagnosis, and low cost. However, there is always a trade-off between sensitivity and selectivity, which limits the detection of trace amounts of biomarkers produced in the early stages. To address this issue, an increasing number of nanomaterials with simultaneous improvements in both sensitivity and selectivity have recently been reported. In this review, we introduce different categories of state-of-the-art electrochemical biosensors and their operating principles, and describe their respective advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, the review discusses the existing detection strategies and performance of nanomaterial-based cancer biosensors for biomarker recognition, providing overall guidance for the material selection of different biomarkers. Finally, we evaluate the main challenges involving existing electrochemical cancer biosensors to present the future development prospects of nanomaterials and detection strategies. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.