A Review on Saliva-Based Health Diagnostics: Biomarker Selection and Future Directions.

The human body has a unique way of saying when something is wrong with it. The molecules in the body fluids can be helpful in the early detection of diseases by enabling health and preventing disease progression. These biomarkers enabling better healthcare are becoming an extensive area of research interest. Biosensors that detect these biomarkers are becoming the future, especially Point Of Care (POC) biosensors that remove the need to be physically present in the hospital. Detection of complex and systemic diseases using biosensors has a long way to go. Saliva-based biosensors are gaining attention among body fluids due to their non-invasive collection and ability to detect periodontal disease and identify systemic diseases. The possibility of saliva-based diagnostic biosensors has gained much publicity, with companies sending home kits for ancestry prediction. Saliva-based testing for covid 19 has revealed effective clinical use and relevance of the economic collection. Based on universal biomarkers, the detection of systemic diseases is a booming research arena. Lots of research on saliva-based biosensors is available, but it still poses challenges and limitations as POC devices. This review paper talks about the relevance of saliva and its usefulness as a biosensor. Also, it has recommendations that need to be considered to enable it as a possible diagnostic tool.

In Vivo Generation of Post-infarct Human Cardiac Muscle by Laminin-Promoted Cardiovascular Progenitors.

Regeneration of injured human heart muscle is limited and an unmet clinical need. There are no methods for the reproducible generation of clinical-quality stem cell-derived cardiovascular progenitors (CVPs). We identified laminin-221 (LN-221) as the most likely expressed cardiac laminin. We produced it as human recombinant protein and showed that LN-221 promotes differentiation of pluripotent human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) toward cardiomyocyte lineage and downregulates pluripotency and teratoma-associated genes. We developed a chemically defined, xeno-free laminin-based differentiation protocol to generate CVPs. We show high reproducibility of the differentiation protocol using time-course bulk RNA sequencing developed from different hESC lines. Single-cell RNA sequencing of CVPs derived from hESC lines supported reproducibility and identified three main progenitor subpopulations. These CVPs were transplanted into myocardial infarction mice, where heart function was measured by echocardiogram and human heart muscle bundle formation was identified histologically. This method may provide clinical-quality cells for use in regenerative cardiology.