From May 19 to 22, 2025, the World Congress on Biosensors (Biosensors 2025) will be held in Lisbon, Portugal. This edition will newly introduce a "Synthetic Biology for Biosensors" pre-congress school. As the conference chair, Professor Xian-En Zhang from Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology systematically outlined the evolution of biosensing technology: from its origins and field formation, through scaled applications, to empowerment by nanotechnology. He further noted that synthetic biology is currently reshaping the design paradigm of biosensors.

Key Topics:

The thematic session explored the transformations that synthetic biology brings to biosensing technology:

Component Innovation: Synthetic biology enables enhanced engineering design and modification of core biosensing components—biological recognition elements.

Intelligent Upgrades: Synthetic biology combined with AI will optimize the entire chain of biosensing from “signal processing-transduction-output”.

Performance Leaps: Improvements in biomolecular recognition elements and cascading amplification of cellular signals will significantly enhance sensor sensitivity and specificity, and may also address stability challenges.

Functional Expansion: Synthetic biology creates a wealth of new biomolecular recognition elements and cellular signaling systems, expanding application scopes and potentially upgrading from detection tools to “perceive-decide-execute” intelligent systems (such as integrated diagnostics).

The thematic session included a roundtable discussion hosted by Professor Wang Baojun from Zhejiang University, focusing on three topics:How synthetic biology-enabled technologies can overcome biosensing performance bottlenecks? What real-world applications will they enable? And what barriers block their commercialization? Representatives from academia, industry, and young scholars engaged in multidimensional discussions.

Chinese scholars have performed impressively in synthetic biosensing research, with their paper publications and high-impact papers rankingsecond globally. The team led by Professor Wang Baojun from Zhejiang University won the sole Best Paper Award at Biosensors 2025 for their research on “High-Sensitivity Cellular Sensors Based on Trans-Splicing Noise-Reduction Circuits”; Professor Ye Haifeng from East China Normal University delivered a keynote presentation titled Precision Medicine Based on Biosensor Circuits; and researchers such as Men Dong from Guangzhou Laboratory, Associate Researcher Tan Xiaotian from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Professor Tian Bo from Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, shared cutting-edge results and academic insights in the thematic session.

In his summary at the thematic session, Professor Xian-En Zhang stated: “Synthetic biosensing is replicating the explosive growth trend of nanobiosensing from 20 years ago. As synthetic biology technologies advance and barriers lower, this field will become one of the new mainstreams in biosensing, ushering in a wave of industrialization over the next five years.”