Surgical resection of solid tumors is currently the gold standard and preferred therapeutic strategy for cancer. Chemotherapy drugs also make a significant contribution by inhibiting the rapid growth of tumor cells and these two approaches are often combined to enhance treatment efficacy. However, surgery and chemotherapy inevitably lead to severe side effects and high systemic toxicity, which in turn results in poor prognosis. Precision medicine has promoted the development of treatment modalities that are developed to specifically target and kill tumor cells. Advances in in vivo medical imaging for visualizing tumor lesions can aid diagnosis, facilitate surgical resection, investigate therapeutic efficacy, and improve prognosis. In particular, the modality of fluorescence imaging has high specificity and sensitivity and has been utilized for medical imaging. Therefore, there are great opportunities for chemists and physicians to conceive, synthesize, and exploit new chemical probes that can image tumors and release chemotherapy drugs in vivo. This review focuses on small molecular ligand-targeted fluorescent imaging probes and fluorescent theranostics, including their design strategies and applications in clinical tumor treatment. The progress in chemical probes described here suggests that fluorescence imaging is a vital and rapidly developing field for interventional surgical imaging, as well as tumor diagnosis and therapy.

Baseline correction methods based on penalized least squares are successfully applied to various spectral analyses.

This review comprehensively presents the fifty-year journey of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), covering its discovery, pivotal phases, innovative methods, and key inspirations from the pioneers and trailblazers.

User-friendly lateral flow (LF) strips have been extensively used for point-of-care (POC) self-diagnostics, but they have some limitations in their detection sensitivity and quantitative analysis because they only identify the high cut-off value of a biomarker by utilizing color changes that are detected with the naked eye. To resolve these problems associated with LF strips, we developed a novel surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-based LF assay for the quantitative analysis of a specific biomarker in the low concentration range. Herein, human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) DNA was chosen as the specific biomarker. Raman reporter-labeled gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) were employed as SERS nano tags for targeting and detecting the HIV-1 DNA marker, as opposed to using bare AuNPs in LF strips. It was possible to quantitatively analyze HIV-1 DNA with high sensitivity by monitoring the characteristic Raman peak intensity of the DNA-conjugated AuNPs. Under optimized conditions, the detection limit of our SERS-based lateral flow assay was 0.24 pg/mL, which was at least 1000 times more sensitive compared to colorimetric or fluorescent detection methods. These results demonstrate the potential feasibility of the proposed SERS-based lateral flow assay to quantitatively detect a broad range of genetic diseases with high sensitivity.