Biosensors Advances: Contributions to Cancer Diagnostics and Treatment

Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide, and its survival rate is significantly affected by early detection and treatment. However, most current diagnostic methods are symptoms oriented, and detecting cancer only in advanced phases. The few existent screening methods, such as mammograms and papanicolaou tests are invasive and not continuous, resulting in a high percentage of non-detected cancers in the early phases. Thus, there is an urgent need to create technologies that make cancer diagnostics more accessible to populations, enabling continuous or semi-continuous, noninvasive, "long-term" screening of cancer in high-risk patients and the whole population. Biosensors are being developed to create technologies that can be applied to point-of-care, wearable, and implantable diagnostics, aiming to fill this important gap in cancer early detection, and, therefore, increase the cancer rate of survival and reduce its morbidity. The versatility of these technologies, due to their miniaturization and diverse detection modes, will enable great advances in cancer early detection, since they can be adapted to the patient and its context, allowing personalized medicine to become a reality.