Multiple diseases discriminated by quantitation of blood transcriptome

The steady circulation and physiologically interactive nature of blood ensures that this dynamic system encounters, transmits, and responds to a wide range of biological signals. In this context, we hypothesized that quantitative measurement of the blood transcriptome can enable the identification and validation of RNA transcripts that are specifically associated with the presence of a particular disease or clinical condition. In the present study, we have used 631 blood RNA expression profiling in conjunction with microarray technology to generate highly discriminative panels of 10 pairs of probe sets for each of four separate clinical conditions (gender, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer and osteoarthritis). The robust training set performance for each disease - or condition-specific multi-gene panel was corroborated with an independent test set, with areas under the receiver-operating characteristic curves ranging from 0.87 to 0.93 for each of the four conditions in the test set population. This study demonstrates that quantitative measurement of the blood transcriptome, in conjunction with microarray technology, can be used to generate highly discriminative multi-gene panels for many clinical conditions. This approach has great potential to enable the simultaneous monitoring of multiple disease states or clinical conditions from a single blood sample.