Salivary diagnostics

Abstract

Authors – Lee JM, Garon E, Wong DT The ability to monitor health status, disease onset and progression, and treatment outcome through non‐invasive means is a most desirable goal in the health care promotion and delivery. There are three prerequisites to materialize this goal: specific biomarkers associated with a health or disease state; a non‐invasive approach to detect and monitor the biomarkers; and the technologies to discriminate the biomarkers. A national initiative catalyzed by the National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) 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 individuals. Progress has shown this is an ideal opportunity to bridge state of the art saliva‐based biosensors, optimized to disease discriminatory salivary biomarkers, for diagnostic applications. Oral fluid being the ‘mirror of body’ is a perfect medium to be explored for health and disease surveillance. The translational applications and opportunities are enormous.