Biosensors For Cancer Diagnosis Based on Quantum Dots

Abstract

Cancer, one of the most dangerous illnesses threatening people’s lives, caused nearly 2.4 million death last year in China. Effective and timely detection is the key to relieving and even successfully treating this disease. In order to realize the aim of early and sensitive diagnosis, multiple nanomaterials have been used, including the rising materials in recent years, quantum dots. Compared with other materials, quantum dots (QDs) have various advantages, like cheap fabrication expense, great fluorescent behavior, high sensitivity to targeted cells or related markers, versatile recognizing strategies, no toxicity and low detection limits. These properties enable this material to become the popular choice for biosensors. In this review, two main streams were chosen in the quantum dots-based biosensors: graphene quantum dots (GQDs) based biosensors and carbon quantum dots (CQDs) based biosensors. The character of each kind of quantum dot was reported and the recent development of these two nanomaterials was introduced, including their synthesis and application of optical and chemical analysis. Therefore, this report can offer great value to the research in the field of quantum dots-based biosensors, which will be used for cancer diagnosis in the future.