Measuring molecular biomarkers in epidemiologic studies: laboratory techniques and biospecimen considerations

• Published in: Statistics in medicine Vol. 31; no. 22; pp. 2400 - 2413
• Main Author: Erickson, Heidi S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Blackwell Publishing Ltd 28.09.2012; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: Analysis; Biomarkers; Biomarkers - analysis; biospecimens; Clinical Laboratory Techniques - instrumentation; Clinical Laboratory Techniques - methods; Design of experiments; Epidemiologic Methods; Epidemiology; genetic epidemiology; high throughput molecular biomarker analysis; Humans; Measurement techniques; population-based studies; sample pooling; Specimen Handling - instrumentation; Specimen Handling - methods; Testing laboratories
• ISSN: 0277-6715; 1097-0258
• DOI: 10.1002/sim.4485

The future of personalized medicine depends on the ability to efficiently and rapidly elucidate a reliable set of disease‐specific molecular biomarkers. High‐throughput molecular biomarker analysis methods have been developed to identify disease risk, diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic targets in human clinical samples. Currently, high throughput screening allows us to analyze thousands of markers from one sample or one marker from thousands of samples and will eventually allow us to analyze thousands of markers from thousands of samples. Unfortunately, the inherent nature of current high throughput methodologies, clinical specimens, and cost of analysis is often prohibitive for extensive high throughput biomarker analysis. This review summarizes the current state of high throughput biomarker screening of clinical specimens applicable to genetic epidemiology and longitudinal population‐based studies with a focus on considerations related to biospecimens, laboratory techniques, and sample pooling. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.