Have you imagined of carrying a laser in your cell or body? Lasers are ubiquitous in our daily lives from industry, communication to medicine. The scale of lasers has also shrunk down to micron and nanoscales. Advances in micro-nanoscale lasers represent a disruptive breakthrough in biological sensing with the potential to unlock new avenues of discovery in health research and life sciences. Such tiny lasers could therefore be used to detect or monitor critical biochemical or physical signals in living cells or human body with distinctive sensitivity and intensity. Nanyang Asst Prof Yu-Cheng Chen introduced the recent development of biological lasers and showcased how this interdisciplinary technology bridges laser physics and biology to tackle biomedical sensing and imaging problems. His talk focused on its application in detecting cancer and neurological diseases, and introduced how tiny lasers can be transformed with intelligent functions for information encoding and healthcare. He also discussed the outlook on the strategies to pioneer novel on-chip and wearable laser devices for future medical diagnosis and bio-intelligent technology.
