Breast Cancer Detection Using Surface Plasmon Resonance-Based Biosensors

Breast cancer is one of the most common tumors and a major leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women worldwide. Although regular screening with mammography has been routinely applied in clinical diagnosis for many years, the assessment of early breast cancer for prognosis and the prediction of treatment benefi t remains a challenge. Therefore, the detection of tumor biomarkers, including genetic and proteomic tumor markers, plays an important role in the determination of prognosis and the individualization of treatment strategies for breast cancer. There are many commercial kits available that utilize enzyme and fl uorescent substrates in the clinical diagnosis. However, these conventional approaches always have some drawbacks, leading to the need of other new automated detections. Immunosensors, showing promise as alternatives, are already used for breast cancer screening. Application of immunosensors in cancer testing offers several distinct advantages over other clinical analyses. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is one of the popular transducers among the immunosensing approaches. Such optical transducers are 1Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. aE-mail: cwlinx@ntu.edu.tw bE-mail: ccchang.ibme@gmail.com List of abbreviations after the text. 230 Biosensors and Cancer extraordinarily useful for giving the targeted information in a simple and fast manner in connection to analyzers. This chapter focuses on the current developments in SPR biosensor technologies for breast cancer-associated biomarkers. It involves the fundamental principle, biomedical applications, and future challenges.