Biosensors based on field effect transistor (FET), also known as Bio‐FETs, offer numerous advantages, including high sensitivity, rapid response speed, low operating voltage, compact size, high reliability, and easily integrative. These features endow Bio‐FETs with tremendous performance in rapid analysis for samples with ultra‐low concentration at large‐scale, broadening their multiple potential applications. In recent years, the research based on Bio‐FETs has attracted more and more attention. A lot of effort is put into the challenge to improve their sensitivity, which can be influenced by various factors. This review focuses on the current approaches from multiple perspectives, including overcoming the influence of Debye shielding effects, promoting the binding efficiency of analytes and FETs surface, and improving the structures of FETs device. Correspondingly, novel strategies to increase the Debye length, facilitate high frequency electric field modulation, enhance the specific interaction efficiency, and enlarge the specific surface area (SBET) are also summarized. Additionally, there is a lack of a reliable standard method to characterize the sensitivity of FETs currently. Regarding this issue, the most commonly used definitions and representation parameters of sensitivity are also evaluated. Overall, this review outlines the potential future research directions to offer insights for enhancing the sensitivity of Bio‐FETs.

A bright-field image cytometry technique, assisted by a multi-frame image correlation algorithm, is introduced for label-free CTC detection.

Simultaneously achieving high sensitivity and detection speed with traditional solid-state biosensors is usually limited since the target molecules must passively diffuse to the sensor surface before they can be detected. Microfluidic techniques have been applied to shorten the diffusion time by continuously moving molecules through the biosensing regions. However, the binding efficiencies of the biomolecules are still limited by the inherent laminar flow inside microscale channels. In this study, focused traveling surface acoustic waves were directed into an acoustic microfluidic chip, which could continuously enrich the target molecules into a constriction zone for immediate detection of the immune reactions, thus significantly improving the detection sensitivity and speed. To demonstrate the enhancement of biosensing, we first developed an acoustic microfluidic chip integrated with a focused interdigital transducer; this transducer had the ability to capture more than 91% of passed microbeads. Subsequently, polystyrene microbeads were pre-captured with human IgG molecules at different concentrations and loaded for detection on the chip. As representative results, ~0.63, 2.62, 11.78, and 19.75 seconds were needed to accumulate significant numbers of microbeads pre-captured with human IgG molecules at concentrations of 100, 10, 1, and 0.1 ng/mL (~0.7 pM), respectively; this process was faster than the other methods at the hour level and more sensitive than the other methods at the nanomolar level. Our results indicated that the proposed method could significantly improve both the sensitivity and speed, revealing the importance of selective enrichment strategies for rapid biosensing of rare molecules.