Review-Nanostructured chemoresistive sensors as detectors of volatile biomarkers for medical screening purposes of mundane and oncological human pathologies

The pandemic showed how early screening and precise monitoring of the individual state of health is a must to avoid serious outbreaks, with all the consequences for the public health and the international society itself. Observing also parallel application external to viral or bacterial agents, pre-screening for neoplasms has proven time and time again to lesser the costs of treatment, with higher chances of survival for the patients involved. Nonetheless, the development of reliable, fast responding medical devices is not always easily carried out, given the various nature of the diseases and markers observed. Nanostructured chemoresistive sensors have proven time and time again their capability to detect small quantities (up to part per billions) of the most various and exotic mixtures of volatile organic compounds, for the widest variety of applications, and in particular in medical-screening fields, for both mundane and oncological pathologies, since the last two decades. In this work, a review on the topic, researching on multiple pathologies and microorganism (and their correlated markers) was conducted. The experimental results on the various volatile organic compounds of medical interest were analyzed, given from foreign works and the sensors developed from the team, targeting both pure biomarkers from gas tubes and various emanations from biological samples of human origins, like blood and tissue from surgeries. It was finally observed how different chemoresistive sensors have the capacity to proper distinguish healthy and diseased/tumor affected patients, even with concentration of the markers resembling early stages of the pathologies.