Emerging diagnostic technologies promise to revolutionize early disease detection and monitoring. King’s College London developed a nanoneedle patch enabling painless, repeated molecular profiling of living tissues, potentially replacing traditional biopsies. Concurrently, novel paper-based microfluidic devices coupled with portable mass spectrometry allow rapid malaria detection, while AI-integrated biosensors for point-of-care testing bring lab-level diagnostics directly to patients. These innovations aim to increase accessibility, reduce invasiveness, and improve clinical decision-making in infectious diseases and oncology.