Current Developments in Salivary Diagnostics

Abstract

Salivary diagnostics is an emerging field that has progressed through several important developments in the past decade, including the publication of the human salivary proteome and the infusion of federal funds to integrate nanotechnologies and microfluidic engineering concepts into developing compact point-of-care devices for rapid analysis of this secretion. In this article, we discuss some of these developments and their relevance to the prognosis, diagnosis and management of periodontitis, as an oral target, and cardiovascular disease, as a systemic example for the potential of these biodiagnostics. Our findings suggest that several biomarkers are associated with distinct biological stages of these diseases and demonstrate promise as practical biomarkers in identifying and managing periodontal disease, and acute myocardial infarction. The majority of these studies have progressed through biomarker discovery, with the identified molecules requiring more robust clinical studies to enable substantive validation for disease diagnosis. It is predicted that with continued advances in this field the use of a combination of biomarkers in multiplex panels is likely to yield accurate screening tools for these diagnoses in the near future.

KEYWORDS::

• acute myocardial infarction
• lab-on-a-chip
• periodontitis
• salivary diagnosis

Financial & competing interests disclosure

Funding was provided by the NIH through grant U01DE017793. B Bhagwandin, JW Jacobson and JT McDevitt have financial interests in LabNow, Inc. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by the NIH through grant U01DE017793. B Bhagwandin, JW Jacobson and JT McDevitt have financial interests in LabNow, Inc. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.