Design principles and fundamental understanding of biosensors for amyloid-β detection

Alzheimer's disease (AD), as an age-related, progressive neurodegenerative disease, poses substantial challenges and burdens on public health and disease research. While significant research, investment, and progress have been made for the better understanding of pathological mechanisms and risk factors of AD, all clinical trials for AD treatment and diagnostics have failed so far. Since early and accurate diagnostics of AD is key to AD prevention and treatment, the development of probes for AD-related biomarkers is highly important but challenging for AD diagnosis. In this review, emerging evidence highlights the importance of the Aβ cascade hypothesis and indicates a significant role of Aβ and its aggregates as biomarkers in the pathogenesis of AD; we present an up-to-date summary on Aβ-based biosensor systems. Four typical biosensor systems for Aβ detection and representative examples from each type of biosensor are carefully selected and discussed in terms of their sensing strategies, materials, and mechanisms. Finally, we address the remaining challenges and opportunities for the development of future sensing platforms for Aβ detection and Aβ-based diagnostics of AD.