Recent field effect transistors and electrical impedance spectroscopy based biosensing strategies for cancer biomarker screening: A mini review

Effective cancer diagnosis involves spotting of malignant tumors at an early stage which can reduce patient mortality and increase the chances of survival. Cancer biomarkers play an important role for staging such cancerous cells, monitoring their development and assessing the prognosis of treatment. Traditional cancer detection technologies often involve multiple steps such as complicated treatment process, time consuming nucleic acid amplification, and target detection, which are not suitable for on-site screening applications. Field-effect transistors (FETs) attract great interest for biomolecular detection, due to their high sensitivity, real time detection capabilities and convenient operation. Further they can be readily integrated with electronics readout. Another promising electrical method is impedance spectroscopy (EIS) which produces an impedance map of a device based upon spatial electrical characteristics throughout its volume. EIS equipment is easy to use, non-invasive, and obtains the data in a way that is comfortable to patients. Most of the recent reviews have been targeted towards cancer biomarker detection using electrochemical techniques. However, there is no comprehensive review of various promising 2D nanomaterials based FETs and EIS dependent methods towards cancer detection. In this paper, the recent contributions of nanoscale FET sensors and EIS method have been highlighted in the framework of various cancer biomarkers detection, discussing briefly their transduction mechanisms and finally highlighting the challenges for translation to clinical applications.