Review: Detection of Cancer Biomarkers from a Clinical Perspective

Cancer is the disease found to be the reason for the largest portion of deaths in the world annually and these mortality values are expected to increase in the future. Early detection of cancer biomarkers may help save millions of lives, particularly by implementing non-invasive and economical detection methods. In this review, we tabulated and quantitatively compared the data collected in 173 rows from 124 publications, which describe the clinical application of various methods in detection of cancer biomarkers. Those methods include mass spectrometry (MS), immunoassays (IAs), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), polymerase chain reaction (PCR), surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). We found that direct methods may have an advantage over indirect methods. Direct SERS reported in clinical applications can also achieve a higher area under the curve, higher sensitivity, and specificity than those parameters for ELISA, PCR, MS, and FTIR applications. Based on the average area under the curve (AUC) values reported in the last 6–7 years for each method, the performance of the analytical methods for the clinical cancer detection increases from IAs (0.76), ELISA (0.83), MS (0.87), and PCR (0.89) to FTIR (0.95) and SERS (0.97).