Discovering new anticancer drugs and screening their efcacy requires a huge amount of resources and time-con‑
suming processes. The development of fast, sensitive, and nondestructive methods for the in vitro and in vivo detec‑
tion of anticancer drugs’ efects and action mechanisms have been done to reduce the time and resources required
to discover new anticancer drugs. For the in vitro and in vivo detection of the efciency, distribution, and action
mechanism of anticancer drugs, the applications of electrochemical techniques such as electrochemical cell chips
and optical techniques such as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) have been developed based on the
nanostructured surface. Research focused on electrochemical cell chips and the SERS technique have been reviewed
here; electrochemical cell chips based on nanostructured surfaces have been developed for the in vitro detection of
cell viability and the evaluation of the efects of anticancer drugs, which showed the high capability to evaluate the
cytotoxic efects of several chemicals at low concentrations. SERS technique based on the nanostructured surface
have been used as label-free, simple, and nondestructive techniques for the in vitro and in vivo monitoring of the
distribution, mechanism, and metabolism of diferent anticancer drugs at the cellular level. The use of electrochemical
cell chips and the SERS technique based on the nanostructured surface should be good tools to detect the efects
and action mechanisms of anticancer drugs