Karen Knipping
Nutricia Research, Netherlands
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Proteomics Bioinform
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are becoming a real global problem and it is seen that allergies early in life are one of the first signals of development of immune related disorders later in life. Therefore there is a substantial need to identify and validate early, more specific, better and predictive and/or diagnostic biomarkers for allergy early in life. We have assessed the validity and the predictive value for disease severity and/or response to treatment of the known biomarkers in clinical samples and found differences in allergy-related biomarkers in atopic dermatitis, food allergy, asthma/rhinitis and eosinophilic esophagitis. To this date, no single or specific biomarker for allergy has been identified. Since allergy is not one disease, but a collection of a number of allergic conditions, it is therefore not very plausible that one marker would fit all, and probably a more holistic approach using a combination of clinical history, clinical read-outs and diagnostic markers will be needed. The search for new and reliable biomarker will continue and the evolution in biomarker discovery has resulted in an 'omics' approach, in which hundreds of biomarkers in the field of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics can be simultaneously studied. A first attempt to identify new biomarkers for allergy in matched serum and saliva samples of infants with atopic dermatitis versus healthy infants resulted in several potentially interesting new markers which now have to be validated in upcoming studies.
