ABSTRACT
The mantra, “no biomarker, no drug” is frequently heard in a pharmaceutical industry heavily concerned with developing new cancer therapies (de Bono and Ashworth 2010). While some provide a specifi c target for selective cell cytotoxicity, biomarkers (e.g. proteins, metabolites, DNA, etc.) also play a vital role in early disease diagnostics, monitoring the therapeutic response, and improving patient stratifi cation for treatment. The extreme complexity and heterogeneity of cancer both between patients and between cells within a patient has led to a continued push for discovering more biological indicators. However, the major shortcoming in the development pipeline is the inability of biosensors to fully verify these analytes as reliable targets resulting in few candidates reaching the patient’s bedside (Brennan et al. 2010; Kulasingam et al. 2010).
