纳米孔传感技术应用于肿瘤早期诊断的研究进展

近几十年来,尽管研究人员一直在努力开发新的诊断和治疗技术,癌症仍然是世界上发病率和死亡率最高的疾病之一。其中关键点是在肿瘤发生的早期进行诊断。现有的肿瘤早期诊断方法有很多缺点,比如对病患肿瘤组织的侵入。因此,与肿瘤相关的无创诊断的研究已经越来越多并已经取得进展。研究发现,蛋白、DNA或者RNA等生物大分子都有可能成为潜在的肿瘤标志物,已有的检测方法也存在许多缺点。纳米孔因具有独特的物理和电学性质,对生物分子的检测有快速、无需标记和扩增等优点,已被广泛使用和证明。在不远的将来,应用纳米孔对肿瘤标志物进行检测,进行肿瘤诊断并监控治疗过程值得期待。主要介绍了纳米孔传感技术应用于肿瘤早期诊断中肿瘤标志物检测的研究进展。

Progress in Nanopores-based Sensing Technology for Tumor Early Diagnosis

Despite several decades of intensive effort to exploit new techniques for diagnosis and treatment, cancer is still one of the diseases with highest incidence and mortality in the world. The key is to diagnose tumors at early stages. Current early diagnosis methods have some deficiencies, such as invasiveness to tumor tissues of patients. Therefore, vast numbers of studies and developments in the non-invasive diagnostic methods have been conducted and many new biomarkers have been found to detect tumors at early stages. Proteins, DNA fragments, and RNA fragments may become potential cancer biomarkers while detection methods also have some shortcomings. Nanopores, with its unique physical and electrical properties, detect bio-molecules rapidly without labeling or amplification, and have been proven to be very useful in sensing. In the near future, it is highly anticipated that we might be able to detect tumors at a very early stage and monitor the treatment process using nanopores for non-invasive methods. The application of nanopore-based sensing technology for detection of tumor markers at tumors early stages is reviewed.