Integrative biomarker discovery in neurodegenerative diseases

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Data mining has been widely applied in biomarker discovery resulting in significant findings of different clinical and biological biomarkers. With developments in technology, from genomics to proteomics analysis, a deluge of data has become available, as well as standardized data repositories. Nonetheless, researchers are still facing important challenges in analyzing the data, especially when considering the complexity of pathways involved in biological processes and diseases. Data from single sources appear unable to explain complex processes, such as those involved in brain-related disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, thus raising the need for a more comprehensive perspective. A possible solution relies on data and model integration, where several data types are combined to provide complementary views. This in turn can result in the discovery of previously unknown biomarkers by unraveling otherwise hidden relationships between data from different sources, and/or validate such composite biomarkers in more powerful predictive models.This work was supported by national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT),under projects UID/CEC/50021/2013, NEUROCLINOMICS – Understanding NEUROdegenerative diseases through CLINical and OMICS data integration (PTDC/EIA-EIA/111239/2009), and a doctoral grant SFRH/BD/82042/2011 to AVC.