Billions of dollars are invested into the monoclonal antibody market every year to meet the increasing demand in clinical diagnosis and therapy. However, natural antibodies still suffer from poor stability and high cost, as well as ethical issues in animal experiments. Thus, developing antibody substitutes or mimics is a long‐term goal for scientists. The molecular imprinting technique presents one of the most promising strategies for antibody mimicking. The molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are also called “molecularly imprinted synthetic antibodies” (MISAs). The breakthroughs of key technologies and innovations in chemistry and material science in the last decades have led to the rapid development of MISAs, and their molecular affinity has become comparable to that of natural antibodies. Currently, MISAs are undergoing a revolutionary transformation of their applications, from initial adsorption and separation to the rising fields of biomedicine. Herein, the fundamental chemical design of MISAs is examined, and then current progress in biomedical applications is the focus. Meanwhile, the potential of MISAs as qualified substitutes or even to transcend the performance of natural antibodies is discussed from the perspective of frontier needs in biomedicines, to facilitate the rapid development of synthetic artificial antibodies.

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Molecular imprinting represents one of the most promising strategies to design artificial enzyme inhibitors. However,t he study of molecularly imprinted enzyme inhibitors (MIEIs) remains at ap rimary stage.A dvanced applications of MIEIs for cell regulation have rarely been explored. Using asolid-phase oriented imprinting strategy so as to leave the active site of the enzymes accessible,w es ynthesized two MIEIs that exhibit high specificity and potent inhibitory effects (inhibition constant at low nM range) towardst rypsin and angiogenin. The trypsin MIEI inhibits trypsin activity,t ryptic digestion-induced extracellular matrix lysis and cell membrane destruction, indicating its utility in the treatment of active trypsin-dependent cell injury.T he angiogenin MIEI blocks cancer cell proliferation by suppressing the ribonuclease activity of angiogenin and decreasing the angiogenin level inside and outside HeLa cells.O ur work demonstrates the versatility of MIEIs for both enzyme inhibition and cell fate manipulation, showing their great potential as therapeutic drugs in biomedicine.

Biosensors are a class of smart devices fabricated for target analyte detection. A biosensor is commonly made of three basic components: a specific bioreceptor, a physicochemical transducer, and a signal processing device. The bioreceptor part features one of the more crucial technologies of a biosensor to perform specific detection of analytes. They commonly make use of various molecular recognition elements, such as enzymes, natural receptors, antibodies, nucleic acid aptamers, and even synthetic receptors. Then, the molecular recognition events of these bioreceptors can be translated into readable signals in various forms like electrochemical, optical, piezo/pyro electric, etc. Finally, these signals are mathematically processed for quantitative analysis. Nowadays, the great advances in biomimetic materials, in particular the synthetic receptors based on molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs), promote tremendous development of biosensors. Integration of this field with artificial intelligence enables emerging design of advanced biosensors, which has moved from concept to implementation, meanwhile facing new opportunities and challenges. With no doubt, bioreceptor innovation based on molecular imprinting is an emerging driving force for biosensors development. In this review paper, we provide an overview of MIP‐based biosensors, and also their challenges and opportunities moving forward toward wearable devices are discussed.

In this work, two typical fluorescent sensors were generated by exploiting molecularly imprinted polymeric hydrogels (MIPGs) for zearalenone (ZON) and glucuronic acid (GA) detection, via the analyte’s self-fluorescence property and receptor’s fluorescence effect, respectively. Though significant advances have been achieved on MIPG-fluorescent sensors endowed with superior stability over natural receptor-sensors, there is an increasing demand for developing sensing devices with cost-effective, easy-to-use, portable advantages in terms of commercialization. Zooming in on the commercial potential of MIPG-fluorescent sensors, the MIPG_ZON is synthesized using zearalanone (an analogue of ZON) as template, which exhibits good detection performance even in corn samples with a limit of detection of 1.6 μM. In parallel, fluorescein-incorporated MIPG_GA is obtained and directly used for cancer cell imaging, with significant specificity and selectivity. Last but not least, our consolidated application results unfold new opportunities for MIPG-fluorescent sensors for environmentally and medicinally important analytes detection.

Molecular imprinting represents one of the most promising strategies to design artificial enzyme inhibitors. However,t he study of molecularly imprinted enzyme inhibitors (MIEIs) remains at ap rimary stage.A dvanced applications of MIEIs for cell regulation have rarely been explored. Using asolid-phase oriented imprinting strategy so as to leave the active site of the enzymes accessible,w es ynthesized two MIEIs that exhibit high specificity and potent inhibitory effects (inhibition constant at low nM range) towardst rypsin and angiogenin. The trypsin MIEI inhibits trypsin activity,t ryptic digestion-induced extracellular matrix lysis and cell membrane destruction, indicating its utility in the treatment of active trypsin-dependent cell injury.T he angiogenin MIEI blocks cancer cell proliferation by suppressing the ribonuclease activity of angiogenin and decreasing the angiogenin level inside and outside HeLa cells.O ur work demonstrates the versatility of MIEIs for both enzyme inhibition and cell fate manipulation, showing their great potential as therapeutic drugs in biomedicine.

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