Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Piazza Martiri della Liberta' 33, 56100 Pisa, Italy.
J Biophotonics. 2011 Jun;4(6):442-52. doi: 10.1002/jbio.201000123. Epub 2011 May 13.
Many cancer types are characterized by poor survival and unpredictable therapy response. Easy-to-perform molecular analyses may help patient stratification and treatment tailoring. Several integrated devices have been proposed to overcome current analysis equipment limitations. They offer improved sensitivity and easy availability of parallel detection. Particularly, unlabelled optical biosensors combine the manifold advantages of integrated sensors (e.g. easy handling, portability and low-volume requirement) with detection of target molecules in their original form. Here, we review integrated optical biosensor current features, and discuss their possible application to the detection of protein variants from body fluids, with particular regard to histone modifications. Indeed, histone post-translational modifications are a set of epigenetic markers frequently deregulated in cancer. Available technology does not allow a comprehensive analysis of all histone modifications in a single patient. Thus, label-free optical biosensors may pave the way to the discovery and detection of a novel class of biomarkers in oncology.
许多癌症类型的特点是生存率低和治疗反应不可预测。易于进行的分子分析可能有助于患者分层和治疗定制。已经提出了几种集成设备来克服当前分析设备的限制。它们提供了改进的灵敏度和并行检测的易用性。特别是，无标记的光学生物传感器将集成传感器的多种优势（例如易于操作、便携性和低体积要求）与对原始形式的靶分子的检测相结合。在这里，我们回顾了集成光学生物传感器的当前特点，并讨论了它们在检测体液中蛋白质变体方面的可能应用，特别是组蛋白修饰。事实上，组蛋白翻译后修饰是一组在癌症中经常失调的表观遗传标记。现有的技术不允许在单个患者中全面分析所有组蛋白修饰。因此，无标记的光学生物传感器可能为发现和检测肿瘤学中的一类新的生物标志物铺平道路。
