Biomarkers are traits that doctors measure in your blood, body fluids, and tissues. Experts also call them molecular markers and signature molecules. They can be signs of conditions, diseases, normal body functions, or when something goes wrong. Doctors can also use your biomarkers to see how well your body reacts to treatments for a disease you have.
What Are the Types of Biomarkers?
Biomarkers can be broken into several groups. Each group can tell your doctor something different about your body. Common types of biomarkers include:
Diagnostic biomarkers. These tell your doctor that you have a certain condition. They help your doctor make a more specific diagnosis.
Monitoring biomarkers. Your doctor will look at these over time to see how a condition progresses. They might review them over weeks, months, or years to see if your disease improves, gets worse, or stays the same.
Predictive biomarkers. These help your doctor tell ahead of time whether you may respond well to a certain treatment.
Susceptibility or risk biomarkers. Your doctor can use these biomarkers to find out how likely you are to get a condition. They can do this before a disease is even in your body.
Prognostic biomarkers. This gives experts a good picture of how your future with a disease will look. Many doctors use these biomarkers after a diagnosis to see how your condition may progress.
What Are Examples of Biomarkers?
There are many types of biomarkers. Some common ones include your:
- Blood pressure
- X-ray results
- CAT scan results
- Pulse
But biomarkers can also be more complex measures in your body such as:
- Lab tests of your blood and tissue
- Molecules made by tumors in your body that are related to cancer
You may have heard of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for COVID-19. This type of test looks for genetic material from a special organism, like a virus. But it’s not just used for COVID-19. PCR testing can help doctors during biomarker studies to understand more about your body’s fluids and tissue.
Simply put, biomarkers can be just about any measurable factor that helps doctors get an idea of your body’s health.
Why Are Biomarkers Important?
They’re important because they can give your doctor a lot of information about different parts of your health. Your doctor can measure your biomarkers to tell how normal or abnormal a system in your body is.
They can tell doctors different things about your body. For example, in the case of cancer, biomarkers include proteins, genes, or other substances in your body. These can:
Help find some early-stage cancers. Your doctor can use your biomarkers to catch things in your body that are not normal. Early detection of cancer is very important.
Predict how serious a cancer might be. Biomarkers can also help your doctor understand how far along a cancer is in your body.
Look at how you might respond to a cancer treatment. This can help your care team find a proper treatment for you. Biomarkers can also tell how well a treatment works for you over a period of time. Because of this, experts are looking at how biomarker testing can replace image-based tests like CT scans and MRIs.
Monitor how likely it is for cancer to come back. In some cases, if you have a tumor, doctors will take cells from that tumor and look at biomarkers. They’ll give a recurrence risk score. This will tell you how likely it is that your cancer could come back.
Biomarker testing for cancer has many names, such as:
- Companion diagnostic test
- Genomic testing
- Genomic profiling
- Genome sequencing
- Molecular testing
- Molecular profiling
- Next-generation sequencing
- Somatic testing
- Tumor testing
- Tumor genetic testing
- Tumor marker testing
- Tumor subtyping
Biomarkers can also be very helpful to experts creating new medications for different conditions. During clinical trials, doctors can use biomarkers to measure how new drugs affect people. They’ll look into any changes a medication has on different biomarkers in your body.
Other studies are looking into how biomarkers could help in psychiatry. Experts are researching how biomarkers can be tools for the prevention, diagnosis, medication response, and drug development for mental health disorders.
Doing so can help researchers create treatments that are even more specific to your own needs. Eventually, mental health therapies could be more focused on your specific mental health condition instead of a one-size-fits-all treatment.