Biomarkers are biological characteristics that are objectively measured and evaluated as indicators of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes or pharmacological responses to a therapeutic intervention. Biomarkers can be used to determine disease onset, progression, efficacy of drug treatment, patient susceptibility to develop a certain type of disease or predict efficacy of treatment at a particular disease stage. Understanding and harnessing the power of biomarkers is a considerable challenge, because of the wide range of skill sets required in such projects.

Biomarker discovery projects can be hypothesis-driven or non-hypothesis-driven. In the first approach, the scientific evidence indicates that a protein, metabolite or other analyte may be a biomarker for the purposes of your research, and specific targeted approaches to measuring the analyte taken. In the alternative approach, non-hypothesis-driven approach a relatively high-throughput or parallel approach is taken in which many analytes are scanned, typically using techniques such as proteomics or metabolomics.