Abstract

The success of personalized or molecular medicine hinges on the availability of physiologically relevant patient bioinformatics, e.g. biomarker-based diagnostics, therapy selection and efficacy determination. To enable the effective collection of these biological metrics in the clinical setting, it will be necessary to quantify protein biomarkers in small amounts of serum, urine, or sputum and, in many cases, at femtomolar levels. Furthermore, it is desirable to determine the binding affinity, K_D, and/or the relative biodistribution for a therapeutic in the target biological matrix. Since candidate molecular imaging agents have drug-like properties, needing to be delivered in a functional configuration and then bind to the target with high specificity, while not activating undesirable physiology, they can be studied similarly.

© 2013 Optical Society of America