Precision therapy would be transformative for handling human illnesses in the future. For this, living biosensors that can pinpoint when and where diseases emerge are needed. Rapid advances in bioengineering are enabling us to exploit the information-processing abilities of living cells to do this. Living biosensors are living cells genetically engineered to detect analytes with high sensitivity and specificity to diagnose disease in a cost-effective and noninvasive manner in order to treat it in a controlled fashion.
Naturally, cells sense external stimuli in their environment as a means to adapt and survive. By rewiring signaling pathways in these natural systems, new diagnostic and therapeutic systems have been built to sense biomarkers associated with inflammatory, immunologic, and metabolic disorders, some of which have already progressed into clinical trials to gain regulatory approval. For example, living sensors could be designed to precisely sense by-products of inflammation, and to respond by delivering targeted therapeutics in situ.
In this collection, we provide an overview of ongoing efforts in biosensor design, including the current state of tools and highlight translational opportunities, and discuss challenges for enabling sense-and respond precision medicines. Why living cells? Using biology to sense biology makes sense, as living sensors capture the benefits of natural biosensors. By connecting natural transcriptional responses to expression of colorimetric, fluorescent, or bioluminescent reporter genes, living biosensors can continuously sense biomolecules and report this information with the exciting prospect of developing targeted therapies and personalized treatments for many diseases of tomorrow. However, there are still many challenges in the design, such as biocontainment, leakage, specificity, sensitivity, cellular burden and long response time.
The aim of the current Research Topic is to cover promising, recent, and novel research trends in living biosensor engineering for therapeutic, and diagnostic applications. Areas to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
•Circuit design to optimize performance
•Evolvability of natural sensors for increasing the toolkit of biosensors
•Strategies for making biosensors portable between different organisms
•Genetic toolkits for controlling gene expression in non-model organisms
Keywords: Biosensor, Precision Therapy, Genetic Engineering, Therapeutics, Diagnostics
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
