Salivary diagnostics: enhancing disease detection and making medicine better

Abstract

To monitor health status, disease onset and progression, and treatment outcome non‐invasively is a most desirable goal in the health care delivery and health research. There are three prerequisites necessary to reach this goal: 1 A non‐invasive method for collecting biological samples. 2 Specific biomarkers associated with health or disease. 3 A technology platform to rapidly discriminate the biomarkers. An initiative catalysed by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) has created a roadmap to achieve this goal through the use of oral fluids as the diagnostic medium to scrutinize the health and disease status. This is an ideal opportunity to bridge state‐of‐the‐art saliva‐based biosensors and disease‐discriminatory salivary biomarkers in diagnostic applications. Oral fluid, often called the ‘mirror of the body’, is a perfect medium to be explored for health and disease surveillance. The translational applications and opportunities are enormous. This review presents the translational value of saliva as a credible clinical diagnostic fluid and the scientific rationale for such use.