Recent advances on aptamer-based biosensors to detection of prostate specific antigen (PSA)

Introduction: Prostate cancer is the most widespread cancer in men for new cancer diagnoses and the third important reason of cancer demise in the United States in 2017. Early detection of cancer usually increases the chance of successful treatment and quality of life in cancer patients. The detection of cancer biomarkers in blood or serum samples has developed as a powerful medical tool for early diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of treatment response in these patients. Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) is a widely used biomarker in clinical screening for prostate cancer.Description: PSA also replaced as a biomarker in many noncancerous situations, such as inflammation, infection, trauma, and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Moreover, it is used as an ideal biomarker for diagnosis of other prostatic diseases, such as prostatitis and prostatic hyperplasia Recently, biosensors have developed a crucial state of the art technology in laboratory medicine, particularly in point of care testing. Biosensors are analytical devices that employ biological/biochemical reactions for detecting goal analytes and basically consist of a bio-element and a transducer. Aptamers, as a biocatalyst are reproduction single-stranded DNA or RNA molecules which are able of binding to small molecules, proteins and cells with high specificity and affinity. Unique features of aptamers over antibodies include shelf-life, flexibility in labeling, resistant to denaturation, stability and so on, it makes aptamers excellent candidates for biological analysis and biosensorsDiscussion and conclusion: In this review, our goal is considered about aptamers selected against PSA, after that we make an attempt to describe and compare the performances of recently developed PSA aptasensors with different detection methods. To the best of our information, there is a few review articles about aptamer-based biosensors (aptasensors) and PSA have been published as far as this but in this review we reported the most recent studies in this field.