Capillary electrophoresis based on the nucleic acid detection in the application of cancer diagnosis and therapy

Abstract

Cancer is malignant disease that causes many deaths worldwide every year, with most deaths occurring in the middle and advanced stages of cancer. Numerous deaths can be avoided by detecting cancer at an early stage, making early diagnosis and timely therapy critical for cancer treatment. Analyses at the level of nucleic acids rather than phenotypes can eliminate various false-positive and -negative results, and diagnoses can occur at an earlier stage. Many techniques have been developed for this purpose, including capillary electrophoresis (CE), which has the advantages of high-efficiency, high-speed, high-throughput, automation, cleanliness, and versatility, and CE can be conducted on a microscale or coupled with other separation techniques. These advantages afford this technique the ability to meet the future medical requirements that will undoubtedly call for amassing large numbers of samples for analysis, suggesting that CE may become an important tool for providing data in clinical cancer diagnosis and therapy. This review focuses on CE-based nucleic acid detection as it is applied to cancer diagnosis and therapy, and provides an introduction to the drawbacks and future developments of analysis with CE.