Microfluidic platforms for CRISPR-based biosensing advancing molecular diagnostics from benchtop to point-of-care

Abstract

The rapid, accurate, and portable detection of biomarkers plays a central role in clinical diagnostics, food safety, and environmental monitoring. However, conventional molecular diagnostic techniques are often limited by bulky instrumentation, labor-intensive protocols, and complex manipulation. The integration of the CRISPR–Cas system with microfluidics offers a novel diagnostic strategy to overcome these challenges, leveraging the remarkable specificity and sensitivity of CRISPR–Cas along with the miniaturization, integration, high-throughput, and automation of microfluidics. This review aims at summarizing the recent development of microfluidics-integrated CRISPR–Cas systems for biomarker detection, with a specific focus on the advances made over the past five years. Following a snapshot of the working mechanism of the CRISPR–Cas system in diagnostics and the diverse microfluidic setups, we comprehensively overview the applications of this technique for the detection of various biomarkers. Finally, persisting challenges and future trends are critically discussed. Overall, this review demonstrates the potential of microfluidics-integrated CRISPR–Cas systems in facilitating truly rapid, sample-to-answer point-of-care diagnostics, which are essential for global disease surveillance and accessible healthcare.