Diabetes biomarker research

Further validation of these potential retinal miRNA biomarkers will be needed in additional toxicological species, for example, dog and monkey, following treatments with a variety of retinal toxicants, as well as possible studies in laser-induced choroid neovascularization (CNV) and streptozotocin-induced diabetic retinopathy ocular disease models (Rittenhouse et al., 2014). Understanding the temporal and spatial relationships between retinal injuries and circulating miRNAs will be critical to fuUy understand the specificity, sensitivity, predictivity, and reliability of these biomarkers. Further evaluation of the translatability of circulating miRNA toxicity biomarkers in humans will be exciting as the next tier of retinal miRNA biomarker research. Finally, in addition to retinal miRNA biomarkers, there is the need to establish and validate other ocular tissue-specific miRNA biomarkers, for cornea, iris/ciliary body, and lens. 

Until recently, the neonate has been a black box, an eminently valued patient, yet one that is difficult to study and treat effectively. Neonatal research, in particular, is often plagued by ethical problems of invasiveness of protocols, volume of blood to be drawn, inability of the patient to speak on his/her own behalf, etc. Even simple studies that try to address neonatal outcome often pose problems in these areas, requiring volumes of blood that subsequently need to be replaced by transfusion. Because the perceived benefit to both individual patients and to society as a whole is deemed to be highly valuable, such downsides to neonatal research are often accepted as inevitable. The introduction, however, of MS analysis, utilizing low volumes of blood for multiple biomarkers, appears to be a very attractive alternative with great potential. A number of critical areas have already begun to be addressed and include such diverse entities as hypoxic-ischemic brain injury, the infant of a diabetic mother, neonatal renal function, neonatal nutrition, neonatal sepsis, and pharmaceutical development. 

In another research article, Wang et al. [20] successfully applied LC-MS metabonomic techniques to the metabolite profiling of plasma phospholipids in type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2) patients. Diabetes mellitus is associated with a metabolic disorder of lipid or fatty acid in phospholipids. The authors were not only able to differentiate between the samples from the DM2 patients and the healthy subjects but also identified a number of phospholipid molecular species that could be used as potential biomarkers for a differentiation of DM2 patients from the healthy individuals and perhaps even an early detection of DM2. 

Why is it important to accept this challenge A current and near future priority of biomedical research is to understand and treat complex diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer that have only recently become prevalent sources of morbidity and mortality in human populations. A major goal of systems biology and proteomics is to identify and quantify specific proteins for use as predictive diagnostic and/or prognostic biomarkers of disease [32]. Biomarker discovery is... 

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