Prognostic biomarkers have begun to make a big difference in cancer therapy. Drugs such as Erbitux and Vectibix work only in tumors containing the normal version of a gene called KRAS.

As evidence tilts the balance away from widespread PSA testing, a new screening test or biomarker is urgently needed that can distinguish effectively between potentially life threatening prostate cancers and less dangerous forms. Likewise, less risky treatments are crucial.

In other words, even among patients who apparently have the same disease and symptoms, the treatment for each one would be determined by various predictive or prognostic tests. Eventually, these tests could extend even to the sequencing of the DNA in an individual patient s cancer cells, for example.

How do we search for alien life if it's nothing like the life that we know? At TEDxUIUC Christoph Adami shows how he uses his research into artificial life self replicating computer programs to find a signature, a 'biomarker,' that is free of our preconceptions of what life is.

While these criticisms may or may not be justified, it is probably true to say that the New York City diabetes registry, though highly innovative, is at best an interim solution. Rather than relying on laboratory reporting of a single biomarker, an ideal chronic disease surveillance system would extract all necessary data directly from the patient record.

In the 1980 s, a biomarker contributed to the success of the small but seminal clinical trial of human growth hormone in children who were unable to produce it naturally. Some children lose the ability to make growth hormone due to injury or tumors others lack normal growth hormone activity from birth, owing to a genetic mutation and others are missing the gene that codes for the hormone altogether.