Identification of Biomarkers for Type 2 Diabetes and Its Complications: A Bioinformatic Approach

The long asymptomatic period before the onset of chronic diseases presents opportunities for disease prevention. Many chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and its complications may be preventable by avoiding factors that trigger the disease process (primary prevention) or by use of therapies that modulate the disease process before the onset of clinical symptoms (secondary prevention). Accurate prediction and identification using biomarkers will be useful for disease prevention and initiation of proactive therapies to those individuals who are most likely to develop the disease. Recent technological advances in genetics, genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics offer great opportunities for biomarker discovery. In this review, type 2 diabetes and its complications are used as examples discuss pertinent issues related to high throughput biomarker discovery using bioinformatic pathways.