Why am I blogging about this on a multiple sclerosis research blog site? Am I right, or am I right?? Lets just say that this paper was a couple of years in the making, as with anything which involves regulation.
Firstly though what is a biomarker? A biomarker is...
"a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or pharmacologic responses to a therapeutic intervention".
For example, blood pressure is a biomarker, oligoclonal bands is another example; simply anything that can be measured or you can put a value to.
And why?
It is important to standardise biomarker reporting in MS research to make the research that is published a) reliable and b) to allow others to reproduce it.
What is very annoying is that some prominent names in the MS community still think that there is no reliable marker of disease activity in MS out there (diagnostic or otherwise). And there has never been convincing counter arguments. [What I like to think of as secular stagnation]. Hopefully with standardisation we may get some robust measures which will change the way we think and talk about MS!
CoI: We are authors on this paper