Roadmap on Universal Photonic Biosensors for Real-Time Detection of Emerging Pathogens

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it abundantly clear that the state-of-the-art biosensors may not be adequate for providing a tool for rapid mass testing and population screening in response to newly emerging pathogens. The main limitations of the conventional techniques are their dependency on virus-specific receptors and reagents that need to be custom-developed for each recently-emerged pathogen, the time required for this development as well as for sample preparation and detection, the need for biological amplification, which can increase false positive outcomes, and the cost and size of the necessary equipment. Thus, new platform technologies that can be readily modified as soon as new pathogens are detected, sequenced, and characterized are needed to enable rapid deployment and mass distribution of biosensors. This need can be addressed by the development of adaptive, multiplexed, and affordable sensing technologies that can avoid the conventional biological amplification step, make use of the optical and/or electrical signal amplification, and shorten both the preliminary development and the point-of-care testing time frames. We provide a comparative review of the existing and emergent photonic biosensing techniques by matching them to the above criteria and capabilities of preventing the spread of the next global pandemic.

Recent Progress in Spectroscopic Methods for the Detection of Foodborne Pathogenic Bacteria

“…Different reactions of certain enzymes with the cells emit photons as a byproduct. The emission of photons during the reaction creates fluorescence that is utilized in the detection process of various pathogens [ 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 ].…”

Intelligent metaphotonics empowered by machine learning

“…The examples described above, together with other achievements of AI-supplemented sensing, suggest the beginning of a revolutionary era of intelligent biosensors, extensively discussed in literature (see Refs. [129,[141][142][143][144] for instance). Seemingly, metastructures and metasurfaces will play an important role in the development of those ideas.…”

Rapid and direct quantification of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with an ultrasensitive nanobody-based photonic nanosensor

“…Among the different sensor modalities, photonic biosensors based on the evanescent field principle have been positioned as an ideal technology, performing ultrasensitive analysis in a label-free and real-time format. [7][8][9] Latest research on labelfree photonic biosensors has demonstrated their excellent capabilities for detection and identification of respiratory virus infections, such as influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, and coronaviruses. 7 For SARS-CoV-2, few studies have been recently published fully addressing the label-free optical biosensing of viral particles, [10][11][12] viral RNA, 13 or viral antigens.…”