Omics

In this context, health care biomarkers are of major interest to deduce a person’s (or animal’s) health status in regard to specific markers such as Vitamin D, which directly affects bone mineralization and calcium regulation in the body [1].

The approach of general medical care is changing from broad-spectrum drugs towards personalized healthcare. The new trend is fueled by an increasing level of information flow, transparency, customization and patient choice, all together leading to new services. Patients are able to gather an enormous amount of medical data from the internet or even order blood and biomarker tests themselves. Direct analytical blood tests are already available for certain markers [2]. The growing awareness of healthcare issues and recent developments of minimally invasive blood biomarker tests show the huge future potential of this life science branch. In the future, personalized drug dosage could be established by almost online monitoring the particular biomarker, thus providing more safety for the patient based on smart dosages and dynamically updated dosage profiles [3]. Biomarker analysis is not only for monitoring a drug dosage, it can be applied much earlier – before the disease even appears.

[1] G. Nys, M. G. M. Kok, A. C. Servais, and M. Fillet, “Beyond dried blood spot: Current microsampling techniques in the context of biomedical applications,” TrAC - Trends Anal. Chem., vol. 97, pp. 326–332, 2017.

[2] T. Holen, F. Norheim, T. E. Gundersen, P. Mitry, J. Linseisen, P. O. Iversen, and C. A. Drevon, “Biomarkers for nutrient intake with focus on alternative sampling techniques,” Genes Nutr., vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–20, 2016.

[3] Y. Sandlers, “The future perspective: metabolomics in laboratory,” Transl. Res., pp. 1–11, 2017.