Biomarker Trends: Luminex & Olink, Dried Blood Spots & Plasma

Biomarker discovery is at the forefront of understanding disease etiology, diagnosis and emerging treatments. One of the hurdles is to compare data generated by different platforms and technologies. Measurements of common biomarkers between vendors is another challenge which increases as we multiplex and generate more complex data. We address both these aspects concentrating on two major platforms: Luminex and Olink, in serum and cerebrospinal fluid samples. We find that among 30 overlapping cytokines and chemokines, about 20 display similar trends across these two platforms with comparable sensitivity. A few cytokines had differential and reduced sensitivity in one of these platforms emphasizing the need for improved biomarker detection. Our analysis offers a simple method to compare the data from the two platforms. In addition, we demonstrate the use of Dried Blood Spots as a reliable source for generating multiplex data. We compare plasma and DBS samples and observe similar trends for four out of the six cytokines analyzed, specifically: IL-1b, IFN-g, IL-6 and TNF-a. We discuss limitations of this approach and the need to analyze additional biomarkers in both matrices.