Advances in Cervical Cancer Diagnostics Based on Immunosensors: Innovative Approaches and Tumor Biomarkers

Immunosensors are promising analytical tools for screening and diagnosis of cervical cancer (CC) due to being practical, rapid and economical as compared with conventional methods. Choosing a sensible and specific tumor marker (TM) serving as target which is immobilized on sensor surface is a crucial step for a CC immunosensor. In addition, the transducer design involving optical, piezoelectric or electrochemical converting of antigen-antibody interaction in the analytical signals could be projected to achieve a maximal sensitivity, guarantying accuracy in the detection of CC. This review aims to describe more important TMs and transducers used for the development of immunosensors for CC. An overview of experimental articles published in the last decade designed to detect TM associated with CC, using optical, electrochemical and piezoelectric transductions mode are discussed. Although serological TM, such as SCCa, CEA and CA125 are still predominantly used, new biomarkers including the P16, MCM5 and PP1γ2 have been considered specific and reliable for CC diagnostic. Recently, new strategies such as multiplex assays and samples obtained directly from tumor tissue, as well self-sampling, have been proposed to overcome several limitations. Optical and electrochemical are the most popular transducers, and nanoparticles as electrochemical probes and sandwich assays have been the strategies for increasing the limit of detection and sensitivity of immunosensors for CC diagnostic.