Ask the Experts: the future of biomarkers

In the final installment of Ask the Experts on Biomarkers Patrick Bennett (PPD) and John Allinson (LGC Group) provide insight into what the future for biomarkers in bioanalysis might look like.

How do you see the field of Biomarkers evolving over the next 5-10 years?

Patrick Bennett (PPD)

“There will continue to be segmentation in the biomarker field.  Biomarker discovery will continue to expand within the academia, medical and pharmaceutical research institutions.  Validation of the biomarkers as useful indicators will reside in both the medical diagnostic and pharmaceutical development fields.  Vendors will continue to provide improvements in instrumentation, reagents, reference materials and capabilities to measure a growing range of biomarkers.  The most important changes will be clarity between regulated and unregulated biomarker use of data as well as improvements in the reagents and technology for endogenous analytes.  This would include greater availability of more esoteric analytes and better performance of well-known analytes.”

John Allinson (LGC Group)

“I think an overall increase in the understanding of the physiology in many disease areas will enhance the targeting of a number of biomarkers. Some areas, where disease progression is slow and results from studies to demonstrate a biomarker’s utility are an obvious difficulty (Alzheimer’s has been a good example), discovering biomarkers that are more involved at the early stage of these diseases and predict progression into them will, I think, become far more important to make significant breakthroughs in the development of drugs in these arenas.

Many omics technologies will play important roles here, and I hope that the successes we’ve seen in oncology from genomics will be replicated in other diseases.  Of course, new analytical technology may also help and I look forward to evaluating and tracking their performance as they become tools of our trade in biomarker measurement.”

Click here to return to ‘Ask the Experts – Biomarkers’ to read other installments part of this series.