Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF)

Integrated Photonics for Low-Cost At-Home Biomarker Sensors

This highly interdisciplinary project synergizes six engineering and clinical teams from the Medical School and College of Engineering, forging frontiers in high-tech integrated photonics for healthcare. The sensors will initially monitor two chronic diseases: inflammatory bowel disease, which affects three million Americans and contributes an estimated $25 billion in healthcare costs annually, and bipolar disorder, which affects roughly 4% of the population and is a leading cause of disability. U-M is a national leader in research and clinical care for both conditions.

Integrated photonics is a critical backbone technology supporting more than 90% of global data communication, massive data centers, and emerging AI clusters — yet its applications in biosensing remain significantly underexplored. Through recent innovations by the engineering teams, mass production of highly functional integrated photonic biosensors at ultralow cost has become possible. A low-cost, at-home biosensor would provide early disease detection, enable timely intervention, and improve quality of life.

Extending integrated photonics from enterprise-scale high-tech to consumer-scale biosensing will substantially expand its market and reduce costs through large-volume manufacturing, while accelerating home and point-of-care biosensing capable of producing large-scale, quantitative data for AI-enabled precision medicine. The project bridges multiple leading research fields at U-M and is intended to serve as a timely cross-domain catalyst for sustained, transformative innovation across engineering and biomedicine.