Biomarker analysis: Personalised medicine

Determination of individual biomarkers is firmly established in personalised or individualised medicine. These are biological processes that can be measured as lab parameters in the blood count. They are highly valuable indicators and decision-making aids for diagnosis and progress prognosis of complex illnesses, as well as for planning of individualised treatment. A biomarker can be cells, genes, gene products or specific molecules such as enzymes or hormones. Biomarker analysis in our lab enables us to diagnose possible cell defects on a genetic level.

We distinguish between illness-related and medicine-related biomarkers. They supply information on:

• Whether illness threatens (risk indicator, predictive biomarker)

• Whether there is an illness (diagnostic biomarker)

• Likely further development of the illness in the specific case (prognostic biomarker)

• What medicine to choose, i.e. how the individual organism will react to a medicine

 

Tumour stem cells, for example, express, among others, the following molecular oncoproteins that we use as diagnostic biomarkers:

myc	p53m	EGFR	erb/B2	erb/B3
CD44	MDR	VEGF	Survivin	PSA
CEA	Melanoma	GFAP	CA125	CA15-3
CA19-9	ras src	Erb	AKT	mTOR
c-met	uPA	Ido	Oct-3/4	ERa