Biomarkers: New tools of modern medicine

Noted experts explore this topic in April issue of Translational Research

2012-03-19

(Press-News.org) Philadelphia, PA, March 15, 2012 – Over the last few decades there has been an explosion in the discovery of biomarkers for diagnosis, disease monitoring, and prognostic evaluation. In the April issue of Translational Research, entitled "Biomarkers: New Tools of Modern Medicine," an international group of medical experts explores the promise and challenges of biomarker discovery and highlights the latest advances in the use of biomarkers in various diseases.

In a commentary introducing this single-topic issue, Nikolaos G. Frangogiannis, MD, The Wilf Family Cardiovascular Research Institute, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, notes, "Although advanced technologies and hypothesis-driven approaches fueled by the '-omics' revolution continue to provide clinicians and researchers with an expanding list of candidate markers, very few are likely to survive the test as useful clinical tools."

Given the complexity of most common conditions, Dr. Frangogiannis says that multimarker approaches assessing the major aspects of the pathophysiology of the disease may be needed. "Development and implementation of such ambitious efforts will undoubtedly face many challenges, but may eventually fulfill the visionary goal of personalized medicine," he concludes.

HIGHLIGHTS:

Biomarkers: Hopes and Challenges in the Path from Discovery to Clinical Practice
Nikolaos G. Frangogiannis
This overview presents the major challenges in discovery, validation, and clinical implementation of new biomarkers, while discussing the transformative potential of biomarker-guided approaches in clinical practice.

Biomarkers in Acute Lung Injury
Maneesh Bhargava and Chris H. Wendt
The authors evaluate the role of biomarkers in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and acute lung injury, including the likelihood that biomarker combinations may be more accurate in deriving clinically useful information in these complex disorders.

Peripheral Blood Biomarkers in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis
Rekha Vij and Imre Noth
This article reviews the evidence for peripheral blood biomarkers, which are easy to obtain, can be measured longitudinally, and have a high probability of achieving clinical utility for pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a life-threatening lung disease.

Biomarkers in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
Sharon R. Rosenberg and Ravi Kalhan
The authors review potential molecular, physiological, and imaging-based biomarkers that could be used to identify subtypes of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as information on disease activity and its clinical course.

Biomarkers of Heart Transplant Rejection: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly!
Carlos Alberto Labarrere and Beate R. Jaeger
This review discusses the search for accessible and effective biomarkers to detect patients at risk from serious complications after cardiac transplantation, such as acute cellular rejection, antibody-mediated rejection, and cardiac allograft vasculopathy.

Biomarkers in Acute Myocardial Injury
Devin W Kehl, Navaid Iqbal, Arrash Fard et al.
The authors summarize the current status of biomarkers available for rapid diagnosis of acute coronary syndromes, and discuss emerging evidence on promising new biomarkers which have shown the ability to improve prognosis and diagnosis compared to traditional markers.

Developing and Assessing Cardiovascular Biomarkers
Razvan Tudor Dadu, Vijay Nambi and Christie M. Ballantyne
The authors discuss strategies for the identification and development of new biomarkers to direct cardiovascular therapy and monitor therapeutic response. They focus on three biomarkers currently approved for use, as well as two new biomarkers that show promise in cardiovascular disease risk prediction and management.

Marking Renal Injury: Can We Move Beyond Serum Creatinine?
Jessica L. Slocum, Michael Heung, and Subramaniam Pennathur
The intense efforts to develop new markers for early diagnosis, prognostic evaluation, and treatment guidance in acute kidney injury are discussed, along with the barriers that must be overcome for wide-spread clinical implementation.

Genomic Biomarkers for Chronic Kidney Disease
Wenjun Ju, Shahaan Smith, and Matthias Kretzler
The great potential of genomic biomarkers in evaluation and treatment of patients with chronic renal disease is discussed, along with the challenges in predicting chronic kidney disease progression and the opportunities resulting from a molecular definition of the disease.

Biomarkers in Diabetes: Hemoglobin A1c, Vascular and Tissue Markers
Timothy Lyons and Arpita Basu
The authors focus on the established role of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) as an indicator of the presence and severity of hypoglycemia, and the development of new blood and tissue-based biomarkers that may enable the detection, prevention, and treatment of diabetes long before overt disease develops.

Biomarkers in Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Current Practices and Recent Advances
Heba N. Iskandar and Matthew A Ciorba
This article reviews the uses and limitations of currently available biomarkers and highlights recent advances in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) biomarker discovery, including the potential of inflammatory markers to differentiate between IBD and non-inflammatory etiologies of diarrhea.

Biomarkers for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus
Joseph Ahearn, Chau-Ching Liu, Amy H. Kao, and Susan Manzi
The lack of reliable, specific biomarkers for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) hampers proper clinical management of patients and impedes development of new lupus therapeutics. The authors review recent progress in the development of biomarkers for diagnosis, disease activity, and specific organ involvement.

New Paradigms in Translational Science Research in Cancer Biomarkers
Paul Wagner and Sudhir Srivastava
Despite large investments, the introduction of cancer biomarkers for clinical practice remains slow. The authors address the inherent difficulties in the development of screening biomarkers and provide a systematic approach for discovery, verification, and validation of biomarkers that may be useful for cancer as well as many other conditions.

### These articles appear in Translational Research, The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine, Volume 159, Issue 4 (April 2012) entitled "Biomarkers: New Tools of Modern Medicine," published by Elsevier.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Study looks at discrimination's impact on smoking

2012-03-19

Smoking, the leading preventable cause of mortality in the United States, continues to disproportionately impact lower income members of racial and ethnic minority groups. In a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, Jason Q. Purnell, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at how perceived discrimination influences smoking rates among these groups. "We found that regardless of race or ethnicity, the odds of current smoking were higher among individuals who perceived that they were treated differently ...

NYC suicide rate 29 percent higher at economy's nadir vs. peak

2012-03-19

NEW YORK (March 15, 2012)—New evidence on the link between suicide and the economy shows that the monthly suicide rate in New York City from 1990 to 2006 was 29% higher at the economic low point in 1992 than at the peak of economic growth in 2000. The study, conducted by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy, the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing, and Weill Cornell Medical College, appears in the February 22 American Journal of Epidemiology and is available online. "The ...

New research suggests cap and trade programs do not provide sufficient incentives for innovation

2012-03-19

Cap and trade programs to reduce emissions do not inherently provide incentives to induce the private sector to develop innovative technologies to address climate change, according to a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, said author Margaret Taylor, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) who conducted the study while an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, the success of some cap and trade programs in achieving predetermined pollution ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble discover quasars acting as gravitational lenses

2012-03-19

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found several examples of galaxies containing quasars, which act as gravitational lenses, amplifying and distorting images of galaxies aligned behind them. Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe, far outshining the total starlight of their host galaxies. Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes. To find these rare cases of galaxy-quasar combinations acting as lenses, a team of astronomers led by Frederic Courbin at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) selected 23,000 ...

NASA's IceBridge 2012 Arctic campaign takes to the skies

2012-03-19

GREENBELT, Md. -- Researchers and flight crew with NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne mission to study changes in polar ice, began another season of science activity with the start of the 2012 Arctic campaign on March 13. From mid-March through mid-May, a modified P-3 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., will conduct daily missions out of Thule and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland —with one flight to Fairbanks, Alaska and back—to measure sea and land ice. The campaign will also feature instrument tests, continued international collaboration and educational ...

Now a cyclone, NASA sees Lua closer to a landfall in northern Australia

2012-03-19

Warnings are in effect and evacuations have taken place along the northern Australia coast near Port Hedland. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Lau as it strengthened into a Cyclone today, March 15, 2012. On March 15, 2012 at 02:31 UTC, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Cyclone Lua when it was about 400 nautical miles northwest of Port Hedland, Australia. In the image, the bulk of clouds and showers appear to be over the northern and western quadrants of the storm. Satellite imagery ...

White rice increases risk of Type 2 diabetes

2012-03-19

The risk of type 2 diabetes is significantly increased if white rice is eaten regularly, claims a study published today on bmj.com. The authors from the Harvard School of Public Health look at previous studies and evidence of the association between eating white rice and the risk of type 2 diabetes. Their study seeks to determine whether this risk is dependent on the amount of rice consumed and if the association is stronger for the Asian population, who tend to eat more white rice than the Western world. The authors analysed the results of four studies: two in Asian ...

NIH brain imaging study finds evidence of basis for caregiving impulse

2012-03-19

Distinct patterns of activity—which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants-- appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an infant face—even when the child is not theirs, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Seeing images of infant faces appeared to activate in the adult's brains circuits that reflect preparation for movement and speech as well as feelings of reward. The findings raise the possibility that studying this activity will yield insights into care giving behavior, but ...

Straintronics: Engineers create piezoelectric graphene

2012-03-19

In what became known as the 'Scotch tape technique," researchers first extracted graphene with a piece of adhesive in 2004. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb, hexagonal pattern. It looks like chicken wire. Graphene is a wonder material. It is one-hundred-times better at conducting electricity than silicon. It is stronger than diamond. And, at just one atom thick, it is so thin as to be essentially a two-dimensional material. Such promising physics have made graphene the most studied substance of the last decade, particularly in nanotechnology. ...

Inflammatory biomarkers improve the clinical prediction of mortality in COPD

2012-03-19

The addition of changes in inflammatory biomarkers to established clinical variables improves the prediction of mortality in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a new study. "COPD is characterized by low-grade inflammation, so we hypothesized that the addition of inflammatory biomarkers to established predictive factors would improve the prediction of mortality," said lead author Bartolome Celli, lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School and member of the Pulmonary and Critical Care Division of Brigham and Women's Hospital in ...

World's first practical surface-emitting laser for optical fiber communications developed: advancing miniaturization, energy efficiency, and cost reduction of light sources

Biomarkers: New tools of modern medicine

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: