Optical Biosensors and Their Biomedical Applications
A special issue of Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X). This special issue belongs to the section "B：Biology and Biomedicine".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2026) | Viewed by 1191
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue, titled “Optical Biosensors and Their Biomedical Applications”, spotlights the rapid advances and transformative potential of micro- and nanoscale photonic platforms that are reshaping biosensing and cellular analysis. Cutting-edge devices—spanning plasmonic nanoantennas, metamaterial substrates, photonic crystals, and other engineered nanostructures—now deliver sensitivities and specificities once attainable only with bulky laboratory equipment, while providing extreme miniaturization suitable for lab-on-a-chip, fiber, or wearable formats. Featured papers delve into design and fabrication strategies, including surface functionalization, signal-amplifying architectures, and seamless optofluidic or semiconductor integration. Techniques such as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) figure prominently for label-free molecular fingerprinting at ultra-low levels, even within complex biological matrices. This Special Issue highlights how these sensors enable early disease diagnosis, real-time therapeutic monitoring, high-throughput drug screening, and targeted drug delivery by precisely detecting and manipulating biomolecules, cells, and biomarkers. Alongside fundamental studies that unravel light–matter interactions at the nanoscale, authors present demonstrations in clinically relevant contexts, underscoring pathways toward point-of-care testing and personalized medicine. Collectively, the contributions chart the future of biomedical optics, where compact, high-performance sensors promise to improve healthcare outcomes across scales—from single-cell interrogation to systemic monitoring in vivo.
Dr. Wonil Nam
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)
- plasmonic nanoantenna
- microfluidic biosensor
- lab-on-a-chip
- photonic crystal sensor
- whispering-gallery-mode microresonator
- optical microfiber
- optofluidics
- fluorescence lifetime imaging
- intracellular sensing
- optoporation
- wearable optical sensor
- point-of-care diagnostics
- nanoplasmonics
- single-molecule detection
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