Development of Nanoparticle-Enabled Protein Biomarker Discovery: Implementation for Saliva-Based Traumatic Brain Injury Detection

In this chapter we will discuss a new approach for amplifying low-abundance proteins for biomarker discovery and how this new approach can be applied to identifying new markers for the detection of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and concussion. Of particular focus is the discovery of nonsubjective, sensitive, and specific biomarkers for early detection of TBI/concussion that can be quantified accurately and which can be measured in an easily obtainable biofluid. We propose that such a method can be applied to TBI detection in saliva—a biofluid that heretofore has not been considered for this application.