This review summarizes recent advances in sensors based on photonic crystal technologies for biomedical sensing applications. Photonic crystal sensing offers enormous promise due to their clear benefits in sensitivity, stability, compactness, portability. This work discusses several photonic crystal structures, such as photonic crystal waveguides, cavities, and photonic crystal fiber for biomedical sensing applications. The uniqueness, measurement technique, and biosensing properties of each type of these structures are discussed. Furthermore, manufacturing and functionally relevant properties that include design simplicity, compactness, and multi-wavelength operation are also reviewed. They are explored, organized, and compared using the most recent related literature in this field. Finally, a brief of novel trends has been introduced.