Biosensors as transformative tools for multiplex detection of respiratory viral pathogens

Respiratory viral infections remain a major global health challenge, highlighting the need for rapid, sensitive, and accessible diagnostic approaches. Conventional diagnostic techniques, including reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), viral culture, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA), provide high analytical performance but are often limited by infrastructure requirements, cost, and turnaround time, restricting their use in decentralized or resource-limited settings. This review critically examines recent advances in biosensor technologies for respiratory virus detection, with a particular focus on electrochemical biosensors, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-based biosensors detection systems, and emerging point-of-care (POC) diagnostic platforms. The manuscript discusses biosensor design strategies, detection mechanisms, analytical performance, and clinical applicability across major respiratory viral pathogens. In addition, current challenges related to clinical validation, scalability, standardization, and cost-effectiveness are analyzed. Overall, current evidence indicates that biosensor-based diagnostic platforms have significant potential to complement existing laboratory-based methods, particularly in decentralized and rapid testing settings. However, further large-scale clinical validation, regulatory standardization, and integration into healthcare workflows are required before widespread clinical implementation can be achieved.