Photonic Technologies for Liquid Biopsies: Recent Advances and Open Research Challenges

Abstract

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 ultrahigh 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. The current state‐of‐the‐art is critically reviewed here, 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.

Multiplexed Liquid Biopsy and Tumor Imaging Using Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering

“…Liquid biopsy, the in vitro detection of tumor-derived biomarkers in body fluids (blood, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, sputum, and ascites), is a promising technique in diagnosis, with some evidence of its clinical utility for a wide range of diagnostic applications, including in the identification of drug resistance mechanisms, patient stratification, the prediction of treatment efficacy, and the identification of drug resistance mechanisms [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ].…”

Diagnostic performance of circulating tumor DNA as a minimally invasive biomarker for hepatocellular carcinoma: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Over the past 10 years, liquid biopsy has attracted substantial attention as a supplement or alternative biomarker to conventional biomarkers (AFP, AFP-L3, and PIVKA-II) and tissue biopsy for tumor diagnosis and monitoring ( Chen & Zhao, 2019 ; Crowley et al, 2013 ; Kondo, Kimura & Shimosegawa, 2015 ). Liquid biopsy is a minimally invasive procedure that usually samples blood, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, sputum, ascites, or theoretically any other body fluid ( Dell’Olio et al, 2020 ). Liquid biopsy initially analyzed only circulating tumor cells (CTCs), but now extends to the analysis of the many components released by the tumor in body effluents (mainly blood), including cell-free circulating DNA, mRNA, non-coding RNA, long non-coding RNA, glycoprotein, “tumor educated platelets” (TEPs), or vesicles such as exosomes ( Poulet, Massias & Taly, 2019 ).…”

Photonic and Plasmonic Metasensors

“…The ORCID identification number(s) for the author(s) of this article can be found under https://doi.org/10.1002/lpor.202100328 DOI: 10.1002/lpor.202100328 research [4][5][6] and play critical roles in the development of advanced methods in nanosurgery, [7,8] targeted drug delivery and nanomedicine, [9][10][11][12] subcellular level, and tomographic imaging, [6,[13][14][15][16][17] immunobiosensing, [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] photothermalenabled cancer and tumor therapies, [25][26][27][28][29] vapor and bubble generation, [30][31][32][33] control of enzyme reaction, [34][35][36][37] label-free genetic analysis, [38][39][40][41][42] neuron stimulation, [43][44][45][46][47] heat-assisted magnetic recording, [48][4...…”