Patent ID: 8515680

Claim:
A method for discovery of biomarkers indicative of a medical condition in a species of organism, from a candidate set of molecular constituents extracted from such organisms, comprising the steps of: determining a set of molecular constituents to test as biomarkers; obtaining first measurements of the quantity of each of the molecular constituents present in each of a first plurality of samples extracted from such organisms free of the condition; training and storing in a computer memory, a kernel-based estimation model using said first measurements as multivariate training observations, each multivariate observation comprising the measurements from a single condition-free sample; obtaining second measurements of the quantity of each of the molecular constituents present in each of a second plurality of samples extracted from such organisms free of the condition; obtaining third measurements of the quantity of each of the molecular constituents present in each of a third plurality of samples extracted from such organisms having the medical condition; estimating with said model, using a microprocessor, an estimated quantity for each of at least some of the molecular constituents in a sample, responsive to inputting to said model a multivariate input observation comprising the measurements from that sample, for all of said second plurality of samples and all of said third plurality of samples; computing residuals corresponding to at least one molecular constituent, each residual being the difference between an estimated quantity of that molecular constituent for a sample and the measured quantity of that molecular constituent for that sample; and comparing, for at least one molecular constituent, residuals from said second plurality of samples with residuals from said third plurality of samples, to identify whether that molecular constituent is a biomarker of said medical condition.