Engineering affibody-based biosensing platforms for cancer biomarker detection.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Cancer is one of the most life-threatening diseases and has the highest mortality rate worldwide. Delayed cancer diagnosis remains a major challenge in cancer treatment. Currently, conventional diagnostic methods still have several limitations, resulting in many cancer cases being detected only at advanced stages. EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH: This review was conducted as a literature study of research on the development of affibody-based biosensors for cancer biomarker detection. The review discusses the characteristics of affibodies as bioreceptors, affibody synthesis methods, and their applications in electrochemical and optical biosensors. KEY RESULTS: Various studies have shown that affibody-based biosensors exhibit high sensitivity and specificity for detecting cancer biomarkers such as human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, tumour necrosis factor-alpha, epidermal growth factor receptor, carcinoembryonic antigen and alpha-fetoprotein. The integration of affibodies into biosensor platforms enables low detection limits, wide linear ranges and good analytical performance in biological samples. CONCLUSION: Affibody-based biosensors show great potential as platforms for cancer diagnosis. The use of affibodies as bioreceptors offers several advantages over antibodies and aptamers, particularly ease of synthesis, high stability and strong binding affinity.