The ability to monitor health status, disease onset and progression, and treatment outcome monitoring through non-invasive means is a most desirable goal in the health care promotion and delivery. There are three prerequisites to materialize this goal: specific biomarkers associated with a health or disease state; a non-invasive approach to detect and monitor the biomarkers; and the technologies to detect the biomarkers. The UCLA Collaborative Oral Fluid Diagnostic Research Center (UCLA-COFDRC) presents a proposal to achieve these goals through the use of oral fluids as the diagnostic medium to monitor the health and/or disease status of individuals. The critical link to materialize these goals is the presence of technological expertise in micro-electro- mechanical systems (MEMS) and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS) at the UCLA School of Engineering. Existing technologies, for which proof of principle exists, are in place to tailor and to optimize for oral fluid-based applications. This proposal will achieve its stated objectives by three Specific Aims.
Aim 1 is to optimize MEMS and NEMS technologies to detect multiple analytes in oral fluids. Technological expertise will be working with experts in oral fluid research for clinical optimizations.
Aim 2 is to translate the optimized technologies to two areas of oral health research relevant to the research missions of NIDCR: oral cancer and oral pathogen detection.
Aim 3 is the Technology Dissemination Phase whereby the optimized technologies will be streamlined for commercialization to be used in clinical and bedside settings. Corporate sponsors will participate in the development and commercialization of our technologies. A Resource and Informatics Core is in place whereby research outcomes from this Center can be disseminated to the research community as well as creating awareness of our resources and technological developments to the public. We are excited to present our collaborative consortium. This is an ideal opportunity to bridge state of the art biosensor technologies to oral fluid for diagnostic applications. Oral fluid being the mirror of body is a perfect medium to be explored for health and disease monitoring. The translational applications and opportunities are enormous. Significant institutional commitments and corporate sponsorships are in place, fulfilling the research, training, as well as technology transfer missions of NIDCR.
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