(Invited) Micro-Nanoscale Living Lasers for Healthcare Applications

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. As the scale of laser become smaller, the functions of lasers have also been redefined by transforming living biologicals into micro- and nanoscale lasers, so called living lasers. Such tiny lasers could therefore be used to detect or monitor critical chemical or physical signals in living cells or human body with distinctive sensitivity and intensity. In this talk, I will introduce the recent development of biological lasers and showcase how this interdisciplinary technology bridges laser physics and biology to tackle biomedical problems. In the first part, the talk will be focused on its application in detecting cancer and neurological diseases. In the second part, I will introduce how tiny lasers can be transformed with intelligent functions for information encoding and healthcare. This will cover applications including sensing at multiscales in biology, imaging in tissues, tracking and monitoring, as well as biomedical devices. Finally, discussion and outlook will be made on the strategies to pioneer novel on-chip and wearable laser devices for future medical diagnosis and bio-intelligent technology. Figure 1