The current levels of breast cancer in African women have contributed to the high mortality rates among them. In South Africa, the incidence of breast cancer is also on the rise due to changes in behavioural and biological risk factors. Such low survival rates can be attributed to the late diagnosis of the disease due to a lack of access and the high costs of the current diagnostic tools. Breast cancer is asymptomatic at early stages, which is the best time to detect it and intervene to prevent high mortality rates. Proper risk assessment, campaigns, and access to adequate healthcare need to be prioritised among patients at an early stage. Early detection of breast cancer can significantly improve the survival rate of breast cancer patients, since therapeutic strategies are more effective at this stage. Early detection of breast cancer can be achieved by developing devices that are simple, sensitive, low-cost, and employed at point-of-care (POC), especially in low-income countries (LICs). Nucleic-acid-based lateral flow assays (NABLFAs) that combine molecular detection with the immunochemical visualisation principles, have recently emerged as tools for disease diagnosis, even for low biomarker concentrations. Detection of circulating genetic biomarkers in non-invasively collected biological fluids with NABLFAs presents an appealing and suitable method for POC testing in resource-limited regions and/or LICs. Diagnosis of breast cancer at an early stage will improve the survival rates of the patients. This review covers the analysis of the current state of NABLFA technologies used in developing countries to reduce the scourge of breast cancer.

Tremendous amount of financial resources and manpower have been invested to understand the function of numerous genes that are deregulated during the carcinogenesis process, which can be targeted for anticancer therapeutic interventions. Death-associated protein kinase 1 (DAPK-1) is one of the genes that have shown potential as biomarkers for cancer treatment. It is a member of the kinase family, which also includes Death-associated protein kinase 2 (DAPK-2), Death-associated protein kinase 3 (DAPK-3), Death-associated protein kinase-related apoptosis-inducing kinase 1 (DRAK-1) and Death-associated protein kinase-related apoptosis-inducing kinase 2 (DRAK-2). DAPK-1 is a tumour-suppressor gene that is hypermethylated in most human cancers. Additionally, DAPK-1 regulates a number of cellular processes, including apoptosis, autophagy and the cell cycle. The molecular basis by which DAPK-1 induces these cell homeostasis-related processes for cancer prevention is less understood; hence, they need to be investigated. The purpose of this review is to discuss the current understanding of the mechanisms of DAPK-1 in cell homeostasis-related processes, especially apoptosis, autophagy and the cell cycle. It also explores how the expression of DAPK-1 affects carcinogenesis. Since deregulation of DAPK-1 is implicated in the pathogenesis of cancer, altering DAPK-1 expression or activity may be a promising therapeutic strategy against cancer.

An entropically-driven binding interaction at a certain temperature may change to an enthalpically-driven process at another temperature, depending on the polarization state of the groups that are involved in binding. The streptavidin-biotin complex has been extensively studied across biological, medical, chemical and material science fields using various techniques, however, not much has been reported on this interaction across a broad temperature range, between 2 °C and 40 °C using biophysical techniques. In this study, we determined how the forces involved in the streptavidin-biotin complex formation are affected by the reaction temperature using the Affinity ITC (TA Instruments). We observed that this complex formation is a spontaneous binding process, indicated by a negative Gibbs energy (ΔG) at all temperatures tested. The observed negative heat capacity (ΔC_p) ∼ −459.9 cal/mol K highlights the polar solvation of the interaction that corresponds to a decreasing enthalpy (more negative) (ΔH) with increasing reaction temperature. The stoichiometry (n) of 0.98 was estimated at 25 °C. An increase in reaction temperature resulted in an almost two-fold increase or more in n, notably from 1.59 to 3.41 between 30 °C and 40 °C. Whereas, at lower reaction temperatures, 2 °C to 10 °C, higher molar binding ratios were recorded, i.e. 2.74 to 5.76. We report an enthalpically-driven interaction between 30 °C and 40 °C whereas, an entropically-favourable interaction is observed at lower temperatures, suggestive of an interaction dominated by nonpolar interactions at lower temperatures and polar interactions at higher temperatures. Consequently, alterations in the polarisation state of streptavidin result in moderate binding affinity of biotin to streptavidin at higher reaction temperatures, K_D 10⁻⁴ ≤ 10⁻⁵ M.