Abstract

Exosome-derived Epigenetic Biomarkers For Saliva Diagnostics

Christa Noehammer, Senior Scientist, Austrian Institute of Technology Gmbh

The aim of our research activities at AIT, the Austrian Institute of Technology, is to define reliable biomarkers suitable for early and non-invasive disease diagnosis and prognosis. To this end we have been establishing and optimizing a whole range of multiplex capability technologies (e.g. microarrays, quantitative PCR, Luminex bead technology) to meet the special demands and challenges of diagnostic biomarker discovery - and validation in body fluids. Using this specific technology expertise we e.g. successfully discovered autoantibody- as well as DNA methylation -based diagnostic marker panels for the big 4 cancer entities (breast, colon, prostate, lung) in serum or plasma. Based on these success stories and the evident advantages of saliva as a diagnostic matrix our recent special interest is to go for saliva diagnostics and to evaluate saliva for its suitability for circulating biomarker-based diagnostics.  Along these lines we will report on the evaluation of different commercially available strategies for isolation of exosomes from human serum and saliva. We will further present data from genome-wide microRNA – as well as DNA-methylation profiling in salivary - and serum-derived exosomes which will also include our experiences when comparing the performance of high-density microarrays and next generation sequencing for miRNA profiling. Last but not least we will report on first salivary and plasma exosome-derived epigenetic biomarkers for type 2 diabetes diagnosis.