Testing for disease could be easy as spit

Blood, spit and tears...more saliva based tests in the works...even a potential test for breast cancer by use of saliva testing...BD

CHICAGO - U.S. researchers have identified all 1,116 unique proteins found in human saliva glands, a discovery they said on Tuesday could usher in a wave of convenient, spit-based diagnostic tests that could be done without the need for a single drop of blood.
As many as 20 percent of the proteins that are found in saliva are also found in blood, said Fred Hagan, a researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York who worked on the study. Like a genome, which lists all of the genes in an organism, a proteome is a complete map of proteins. While genes provide the instruction manual, proteins carry out the instructions by regulating cellular processes.
“This is potentially a large field that has many clinical implications in the area of disease diagnostics,” said Hagan, whose work was published in the Journal of Proteome Research.