Probing cancer signaling with resonant waveguide grating biosensors

Abstract

Importance of the field: Cancer is a collection of diseases that arise from the progressive accumulation of genetic alterations in somatic cells. Genomic approaches have identified a great variety of genetic abnormalities associated with tumorigenesis, and molecular imaging and quantification assays have further elucidated the complex interactions within or between pathways. It is acknowledged that proteins, rather than genes, fulfill most cellular functions and signaling proteins largely operate through a large and complex network. To this end, cancer is mostly a pathway dysregulated disease: a small number of core pathways are dominant in aberrant cell growth leading to cancer. Thus, understanding the functional consequences of dysregulated and/or mutant signaling proteins in the context of native signaling networks is the frontier in cancer research.Areas covered in this review: This article reviews why resonant waveguide grating (RWG) biosensor cellular assays are considered to be integrative in nature, and how RWG biosensor can be used for mining the surface markers of cancer cells and discovering core pathway(s) of cancer receptor signaling.What the reader will gain: The reader will gain an overview of cancer biology from pathway perspective and have a glimpse of potential implications of integrative cellular assays, as promised by RWG biosensor, in cancer research and diagnosis.Take home message: Successful approaches for developing next-generation anticancer therapies and diagnostic protocols should take into account that the dysregulation of oncogenic pathways is central to tumorigenesis. The biosensor cellular assays offer unprecedented advantage in characterizing cancer biology. However, significant challenges are also presented in deconvoluting and validating cellular mechanisms identified in cancer receptor signaling using these assays.