New advances in accurate monitoring of breast cancer biomarkers by electrochemistry, electrochemiluminescence, and photoelectrochemistry

Breast cancer, one of common malignant tumors, is threatening woman's health and life with high mortality rate to this day, and thereby its early screening and detection are of significance in medical diagnosis and follow-up treatment. In view of the low sensitivity, cost-effectiveness and invasive procedures, conventional approaches generally exhibit limited applications in practice. Such oncologic diseases have close correlation with the tumor markers usually situated in tumor cells or secreted by tumor cells. The biomarkers can work as good indicators for developing highly sensitive and specific immmunoassays towards detecting breast cancer. This work provides an overview of recent researches to screen and detect the benchmarked biomarkers of breast cancer, and discuss the developed immunosensing strategies on selected works published early in the past five years. Particular emphasis is focused on remarkable amplification approaches of detection signals to improve the sensitivity. Concretely, the paper introduces the design, fabrication, and applications of such sensors mainly by electrochemistry, electrochemiluminescence, and photoelectrochemistry, coupled with improved stability and selectivity. For developing such high-efficiency biosensors, recent challenges and opportunities are finally discussed towards early diagnosis of breast cancer.