Biophotonics is an emerging multidisciplinary research area, which includes research of optical and photonic methods utilizing the entire electromagnetic spectrum from x-ray to the terahertz region for life and medical sciences.

Biophotonics is a scientific discipline of remarkable societal importance as it can be the key to solve challenges like limiting the impact of an ageing society, averting pandemics and securing the health systems. Its fields of application include applied fundamental research in biomedicine, mainly based on spectroscopic and imaging methods, to understand life processes and the origin of diseases on a molecular level. Furthermore, interest focuses on the development of point of care diagnostics for quick analysis of body liquids (that means miniaturized analytics and diagnostics, in combination with innovative microfluidic technologies) as well as clinical diagnostics, therapy and therapy monitoring (e.g. in ophthalmology where biophotonic methods are already well established).