Electrochemical Biosensor Based on TiO2 Nanomaterials for Cancer Diagnostics

Abstract Regardless of the high awareness of the importance of early cancer diagnosis, a high mortality rate is still present due to cancer discovery at a high advancement of the disease, where it has already metastasized. One of the fields where improvement is needed are the current diagnostic methods that cannot discern the cancerous lesions when these are very small. Thus one of the important fields, where the advancement is crucial, is novel diagnostic methods such as biosensors. Here biomaterials are combined with inorganic transistors to detect and produce a signal once a binding of an analyte occurs. With the development on the field of nanomaterials and their applications as transducers, cancer detection via biosensors could soon become a reality. Material with several advantages, such as high bioinertness and resistance to corrosion from bodily fluids is TiO 2 , which already showed potential in biosensing applications. On the other hand, there is much research focused onto the understanding of the role of extracellular vesicles in cancer progression, therefore the combined effort of having a biomarker for cancer detection and a sophisticated small detection system, such as a (nano)biosensor based on TiO 2 materials, could facilitate the progress in the diagnostics. In this chapter, we offer an overview of the TiO 2 -based biosensors, which were applied for human cancer biomarker detection.