Experts On… Translating Biomarker Discoveries into Real-World Assays

Having a multidisciplinary team gives us deep & diverse expertise to tap across our discovery endeavors. This series shares those insights with you.

The translation of small molecule biomarker discoveries into clinical assays for real-world use is critical to ensure important measures of biological processes, disease progression, and drug response can be made actionable in developing therapies and treating patients.

Sapient’s Dr. Phil Worboys, Head of Translational Science, explains how our biomarker translation services first leverage rLC-MS systems for high throughput, nontargeted discovery screenings, and how biomarkers identified through this method are then both biologically and technically validated to facilitate translation of the discovery into a robust, targeted assay.

Dr. Worboys details how our discovery mass spectrometry is optimized to capture a broad range of chemistries from samples in a single run. These measures are combined with phenotypic data to evaluate correlations of certain molecular features with disease pathobiology and/or drug responsiveness, and are then technically validated using orthogonal mass spectrometry methods. We can also biologically validate biomarkers using our Human Biology Database to amplify discoveries made in a smaller set of samples across a very wide representation of the human population. These steps allow us to more rapidly translate the biomarker into an assay that can be deployed in GLP or CLIA settings.

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