Peroxidase-Mimicking Nanozymes for Rapid Detection of Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases pose a critical global health threat, and rapid and sensitive diagnostics are essential for effective intervention. Conventional methods are often slow, costly, and require centralized instrumentation and trained personnel, limiting timely decision-making. Peroxidase-mimicking nanozymes (PMNs) have emerged as powerful alternatives to natural peroxidases, enabling the development of rapid, sensitive, and robust diagnostic platforms. The superior performance of these platforms is rooted in the well-defined structural and compositional features of PMNs, which endow them with high peroxidase-like activity to catalyze substrate oxidation into easily detectable signals. Furthermore, the unique physicochemical properties of PMNs support the design of simplified workflows, miniaturized point-of-care devices, and novel sensing logics that are inaccessible to conventional protein enzymes. This review highlights structure-activity relationships guiding PMN design, synthetic strategies for constructing these nanozymes, their integration into biosensing platforms for infectious disease detection, and the role of artificial intelligence in PMN design and biosensing applications. By focusing on the interplay between PMN materials and sensing technologies, we illustrate how these systems advance rapid, sensitive, and cost-effective diagnostics. We also provide our perspective on the broader societal impact of PMN-enabled infectious disease diagnostics, along with the challenges and opportunities that shape their translation toward practical clinical use.