The emergence of point-of-care blood-based biomarker testing for psychiatric disorders: enabling personalized medicine.

For psychiatric disorders, repeated failures in converting scientific discoveries into novel drugs has precipitated a crisis and eroded confidence in drug discovery. This review describes how current and future innovations driven by application of biomarkers can help to re-initiate research in this area. This will have positive impact on the field of psychiatry and result in application of sensitive and specific biochemical tests in parallel with the traditional questionnaires for improved diagnosis. Furthermore, application of emerging biosensor tools will facilitate point-of-care testing by fusion of biochemical and clinical data. In this way, patient data will be comprised of past medical histories, biopatterns and prognosis information, resulting in personalized profiles or molecular fingerprints for patients with these conditions.