The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the urgent need for rapid and portable, yet highly accurate and reliable, diagnostic technologies to enable mass screening of the population in a health emergency. Diagnostics in the post-pandemic era (fast, accurate, minimally invasive and portable) is emerging as a key area in the medicine of the future.

Photonic biosensors are one of the best alternatives to achieve this goal. The main advantages of this technology are its small size and high scalability, which allows multiplexed detection and low-cost mass production. To this end, we have developed nanophotonic biosensor platforms based on the evanescent wave technique that are capable of providing highly sensitive, reliable, and highly selective analysis while reducing response times, reducing or eliminating sample transport, and using tiny volumes of patient sample.

Our state-of-the-art nanophotonic biosensors based on nanoplasmonic and silicon photonics technologies have already demonstrated their excellent analytical capabilities, showing limits of detection of clinical biomarkers at the fM level, directly in body fluids, within minutes and in decentralized environments. We have demonstrated the usefulness of this nanophotonic technology for the identification of pathogenic bacteria, the monitoring of anticoagulant drugs, the diagnosis of allergies, the early diagnosis of allergies, the early diagnosis of cancer or the efficient diagnosis of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, among many other examples.