Abstract The detection of cells and viruses is essential for research and clinical applications, creating a demand for high‐performance biosensors. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) enables label‐free, real‐time detection and is highly promising for healthcare, including point‐of‐care diagnostics. However, its performance is often limited in complex biological systems. Integrating two‐dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene into SPR sensors has been proposed as a strategy to improve sensitivity, but experimental evidence remains scarce. Here, we investigate the influence of graphene on SPR biosensors using several relevant biological examples, including antibody‐virus and peptide‐cell interactions. Compared to gold sensors, graphene integration produced reproducible signal enhancement of up to 600%, far exceeding previous reports. Importantly, graphene‐enhanced SPR enabled discrimination between different cell types, a capability not observed with gold alone. Our findings demonstrate that graphene provides substantially greater enhancement than predicted and can be applied across diverse biological systems. This establishes graphene‐enhanced SPR as a powerful platform for advancing biosensor performance, with broad potential in biomedical research, diagnostics, and gene therapy.
Hasnain et al. (2025) studied this question.