Development of Salivary Analyte Stabilizers

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Saliva, like blood, contains a wealth of hormones, proteins and nucleic acid molecules that reflect physiological status; however, unlike other bodily fluids such as blood, salivary diagnostics offer an easy, inexpensive, safe, and non-invasive approach for biomarker identification, disease detection and drug monitoring, and have a high potential to revolutionize the next generation of clinical diagnostics. A major drawback to the use of saliva for these applications, however, is the requirement for cold chain management, which involves the transportation samples through refrigerated packaging methods and safeguards to protect the integrity of collected samples. Specifically, the central issues for salivary diagnostics are that: (1) maintaining the cold chain can be cost prohibitive for large scale surveys; (2) maintaining the cold chain is not possible in many global health applications; (3) not properly managing the cold chain significantly compromises sample integrity a