Teaming up for biomarker future

Biomarkers are considered to be the cornerstones of a preventive and personalized medicine of the future. Interest in relevant research is therefore booming, and so are investments. A recent survey of research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1986 and 2009 revealed that almost 29,000 grants containing the term ‘biomarker’ were awarded during this period, with a dramatic increase in 2009 (Fig 1). The total money for these NIH grants in 2008 and 2009 alone was more than US$2.5 billion. The private sector is also attracted by biomarkers—regarding them as a possible solution to the paucity of R&D productivity in the pharmaceutical sector—and many biotech companies are already pursuing their use, or offer specialized screening services. > The private sector is also attracted by biomarkers—regarding them as a possible solution to the paucity of R&D productivity in the pharmaceutical sector… Figure 1. Number of NIH grants (1986–2009) that contained the terms ‘biomarker’ or ‘biomarker and discovery’, as derived from the NIH RePORT database (http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm) A similar trend is obtained when PubMed is searched for scholarly publications containing the term ‘biomarker’ over the same time‐frame. Reproduced with permission from Ptolemy & Rifai (2010). The ‘gold‐rush’ for biomarkers is spurred by the potentially large benefits—both economical and societal—for those that succeed in identifying a reliable marker with great diagnostic value for disease manifestation or progression, ideally in a peripheral fluid such as blood or urine. The quest for cancer biomarkers dominates, but increasing efforts are being devoted to finding markers for other conditions, from cardiovascular risk or autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, to blood–brain barrier damage or infection‐related complications such as sepsis. Alzheimer disease is one area in which biomarker research could have a huge impact. Although a predictive test for Alzheimer disease risk is needed, no confirmed …