A Tutorial Review on Surface Plasmon Resonance Biosensors: Applications in Biomedicine

Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) has proven to be one of the most effective technologies in terms of specificity, affinity, and determination of kinetic parameters for evaluating interactions between macromolecules. The focus of this tutorial is to give an overview of the recent advances and applications of SPR biosensors in biomedicine that are presented emphasizing the potentiality for the detection of very low abundant compounds, which, in recent years, have assumed great importance for prevention and early diagnosis of various diseases in biomedicine. The real-time detection of important biomarkers such as tumor markers, viruses, and toxins but also of compounds of interest such as drugs and hormones allows point-of-care analysis and monitoring of disease progression quickly and in a less invasive manner. Over the past years, several technical innovations have been introduced to SPR devices, which have gone through a process of miniaturization, portability, flexibility, and cost reduction. These characteristics are in line with the advantages of SPR biosensors over other biosensing techniques, i.e., to be label-free detection systems and their capacity to observe in real-time the interactions between a variety of molecules of interest at the metal surface. Recent advances in SPR sensor technology, such as LSPR, SPRi, and SPRM, attempted to improve the sensitivity and performance of molecule detection.