Slattery, Joshua R., Naung, Ye, Kalinna, Bernd H., and Pal, Martin (2025) CRISPR-Powered Liquid Biopsies in Cancer Diagnostics. Cells, 14. 1539.

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Abstract

Liquid biopsies promise major advantages for cancer screening and diagnosis. By detecting biomarkers in peripheral blood samples, liquid biopsies reduce the need for invasive techniques and provide important genetic information integral to the emerging molecular classification of cancers. Unfortunately, the concentrations of most biomarkers, particularly circulating tumour nucleic acids, are vanishingly small—beyond the sensitivity and specificity of most assays. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats diagnostics (herein labelled ‘CRISPR-Dx’) use gene editing tools to detect, rather than modify, nucleic acids with extremely high specificity. These tools are commonly combined with isothermal nucleic acid amplification to also achieve sensitivities comparable to high-performance laboratory-based techniques, such as digital PCR. CRISPR assays, however, are inherently well suited to adaptation for point-of-care (POC) use, and unlike antigen-based POC assays, are significantly easier and faster to develop. In this review, we summarise current CRISPR-Dx platforms and their analytical potential for cancer biomarker discovery, with an emphasis on enhancing early diagnosis, disease monitoring, point-of-care testing, and supporting cancer therapy.

Item ID:	91969
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2073-4409
Copyright Information:	© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Date Deposited:	18 May 2026 23:04
FoR Codes:	32 BIOMEDICAL AND CLINICAL SCIENCES > 3211 Oncology and carcinogenesis > 321103 Cancer genetics @ 30% 32 BIOMEDICAL AND CLINICAL SCIENCES > 3211 Oncology and carcinogenesis > 321102 Cancer diagnosis @ 30% 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3105 Genetics > 310505 Gene expression (incl. microarray and other genome-wide approaches) @ 40%
SEO Codes:	20 HEALTH > 2001 Clinical health > 200101 Diagnosis of human diseases and conditions @ 100%
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