Biomarker Exploration in Neuropsychiatry: Understanding of the Pathophysiology and Therapeutic Implications

Biomarkers are increasingly sought to detect early onset of illness, to enhance diagnostic certainty, provide prognostic criteria, and permit the mapping of therapeutic outcome in a variety of disorders. Although biomarker science is a field that is advancing rapidly in medicine as a whole, neuropsychiatric disorders are long suffering from an absence of adequate biomarkers and laboratory tests. Despite increasing efforts, the causes of many neuropsychiatric disorders remain unclear. Moreover, it is difficult to provide diagnostic criteria or to assess the therapeutic outcome using the current standard of behavior rating scores. During the past two decades of “omic” era, inspiring advances in genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic knowledge and technologies have provided us with new avenues to investigate biomarkers in neuropsychiatric disorders. In addition, rapid developments in bioinformatics and neuroimaging techniques are aiming to fill the gaps in knowledge among different omic platforms. This Research Topic will thus focus on how the identified biomarkers utilizing the state-of-art technologies reveal the genetic, neuroendocrinologic, neuropharmacologic and psychosomatic mechanisms underlying the neuropsychiatric disorders and their implications for prevention and treatment strategies.