Diseases of the heart and circulatory system are the main cause of death in Europe (over 4 million deaths each year). In particular, heart failure (HF) accounts for almost 1.1 million deaths each year. In early ’90 there was the formal recognition that inflammatory mediators are activated in the setting of HF by a sentinel description of inflammatory cytokines in patients with heart failure. After that, a growing interest in the role of biomarkers in regulating cardiac structure and function, particularly regarding their potential role in disease progression in heart failure, raised up. Nowadays, there are evidences on that. Generally, biomarkers are determined mostly in plasma or in blood, rather than in saliva. In fact, despite of that very few of them have been currently studied in saliva, saliva has to be considered as an important diagnostic and prognostic medium for minimally invasive tools. Indeed, a great progress in disclosing the complete salivary proteome has carried to the identification of more than 3000 different proteins.
The COSMOS Project wanted to expand the advantages of biosensor technologies to establish a novel in-vitro diagnostic tool for early detection of HF. The objective of the project was to develop as a new tool a compact and fast system able to perform, from patient saliva samples, an integrated in-vitro analysis to detect and quantify in real time protein biomarkers related to HF. To reach this end, COSMOS aimed to deliver new tools and reagents leading to innovative technologies and improved molecular procedures to achieve the necessary sensitivity and specificity to detect the biomarkers from saliva. The simultaneous quantification of multiple biomarkers provides the basis for medical doctors in clinics, as well as family doctors, to quantify the individual risk of patients for suffering from HF.
The development and further validation of the COSMOS outcomes should translate our basic discoveries into clinical applications. The proposed device should allow a mass screening for the prevention of HF and other pathologies related to the cardiovascular system.
