Salivary diagnostics

Abstract

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.

Fig. 1

Anatomical locations of the three major salivary glands: parotid, submandibular and sublingual.

Fig. 2

Mechanisms of transport of proteins and ions from serum into salivary gland ducts.

Fig. 3

UCLA’s Oral Fluid NanoSensor Test (OFNASET). A point of care biosensor optimized for saliva detection of multiplex biomarkers, self-contained and being able to detect nucleic acids and proteins without thermal cyclers and ELISA readers nor trained personnel.

Fig. 4

Saliva exon expression profiling.