Salivary diagnostics powered by Nanotechnologies, proteomics and genomics

Abstract

The ability to monitor health status, disease onset and progression, and treatment outcome through non-invasive means is a highly desirable goal in health care promotion and delivery. Oral fluid is a perfect medium to be explored for health and disease surveillance. Two prerequisites exist before the goal of salivary diagnostics can be achieved: identification of specific biomarkers associated with a health or disease state and the development of technologies that can discriminate between the biomarkers. A recent initiative of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research has created a roadmap to achieve these goals through the use of oral fluids as the diagnostic medium to scrutinize the health and/or disease status of patients. This is an ideal opportunity to optimize state-of-the-art saliva-based    biosensors for salivary biomarkers that discriminate between diseases. Seven technology groups are developing point-of-care salivary diagnostic technologies. Three groups are working together toward deciphering the salivary proteome.