Abstract

Saliva, Exosomes and Type 2 Diabetes Diagnostics

Christa Noehammer, Senior Scientist, Austrian Institute of Technology Gmbh

Saliva is a readily and even within short time intervals repeatedly available body fluid, which can be obtained via non-invasive, painless collection. In addition, saliva represents a basically unlimited sample matrix and further offers the advantage of not requiring any special skills for collection. Saliva contains a broad range of relevant molecule classes, such as DNA, messenger RNA, micro RNA, lipids, proteins and antibodies, which all can be used as potential disease/health biomarkers. Along these lines Saliva diagnostics is an emerging field of molecular diagnostics, not least because scientific findings increasingly show that measuring and quantifying salivary biomolecules can be used not only to detect local diseases of mouth and throat but also to diagnose systemic diseases. Due to these opportunities and advantages a recent special interest of the Molecular Diagnostics research group at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology is to evaluate saliva for its suitability for circulating biomarker-based diagnostics.  Along these lines we will show proof of concept studies for autoantibody- and DNA-methylation based salivary diagnostics and report on the evaluation of different commercially available strategies for isolation of exosomes from human serum and saliva. We will further present data from comparative profiling studies in salivary - and serum-derived exosomes including targeted protein-, genome-wide microRNA – as well as DNA-methylation profiling. Last but not least we will report on results of a research project where we are looking for salivary and plasma exosome-derived epigenetic biomarkers for early type 2 diabetes diagnosis.