Dell'Olio Francesco, Su Judith, Huser Thomas, Sottile Virginie, Cortés-Hernández Luis Enrique, Alix-Panabières Catherine
Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, 70125, Italy.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Optical Sciences, and BIO5 Institute, University of Arizona, 85721, USA.
Laser Photon Rev. 2021 Jan;15(1). doi: 10.1002/lpor.202000255. Epub 2020 Dec 2.
The recent development of sophisticated techniques capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of circulating tumor biomarkers in accessible body fluids, such as blood or urine, could contribute to a paradigm shift in cancer diagnosis and treatment. By applying such techniques, clinicians can carry out liquid biopsies, providing information on tumor presence, evolution, and response to therapy. The implementation of biosensing platforms for liquid biopsies is particularly complex because this application domain demands high selectivity/specificity and challenging limit-of-detection (LoD) values. The interest in photonics as an enabling technology for liquid biopsies is growing owing to the well-known advantages of photonic biosensors over competing technologies in terms of compactness, immunity to external disturbance, and ultra-high spatial resolution. Some encouraging experimental results in the field of photonic devices and systems for liquid biopsy have already been achieved by using fluorescent labels and label-free techniques and by exploiting super-resolution microscopy, surface plasmon resonance, surface-enhanced Raman scattering, and whispering gallery mode resonators. This paper critically reviews the current state-of-the-art, starting from the requirements imposed by the detection of the most common circulating biomarkers. Open research challenges are considered together with competing technologies, and the most promising paths of improvement are discussed for future applications.
近期，能够在血液或尿液等易于获取的体液中检测出极低浓度循环肿瘤生物标志物的先进技术不断发展，这可能会推动癌症诊断与治疗模式的转变。通过应用此类技术，临床医生能够进行液体活检，获取有关肿瘤存在、演变及对治疗反应的信息。用于液体活检的生物传感平台的实施尤为复杂，因为该应用领域要求具备高选择性/特异性以及极具挑战性的检测限（LoD）值。由于光子生物传感器在紧凑性、抗外部干扰能力和超高空间分辨率方面相对于竞争技术具有众所周知的优势，光子学作为液体活检的使能技术，其受关注程度日益增加。通过使用荧光标记和无标记技术，以及利用超分辨率显微镜、表面等离子体共振、表面增强拉曼散射和回音壁模式谐振器，在用于液体活检的光子器件和系统领域已经取得了一些令人鼓舞的实验结果。本文从检测最常见循环生物标志物的要求出发，对当前的技术现状进行了批判性综述。结合竞争技术探讨了开放的研究挑战，并讨论了未来应用中最具前景的改进途径。
