Analytical methods for clinical diagnostics

The importance of human health and the need to improve the care of a population, who has increased its life expectance during the last century, have created an increase on the social demands for analytical data suitable to be employed as a scientific base for the earliest possible illness diagnoses and thus, nowadays, hundreds of thousands of urine, blood and tissue analyses are performed all around the world every day. In such a situation we are forced to improve our analytical work in order to accurately and sensitively determine new target analytes useful for the diagnostics of new illnesses and also to improve the available methodologies for the determination of routine analytes in order to save time, reagents and cost, offering sustainable green alternative methods suitable to be extended to developing countries without increasing dramatically the costs, nor the deleterious environmental side effects of so many analyses.

Fig. 1 S. Garrigues and M. de la Guardia

Due to the aforementioned reasons, it was important to devote a special issue of Analytical Methods to the subject of clinical diagnostics in order to encourage the analytical chemist community to cooperate with medical centers to create the tools for well-documented decisions on both the detection of illnesses and the success of their treatments, being confident on the fact that, as much data as possible about the patients could be obtained in as short a period of time as possible so better actions could be done to protect human health.

Based on the objective to provide an updated vision of the problematics of clinical diagnostics based on analytical data, we invited active researchers in the field to contribute with their papers, about new tools available and the applications to specific problems, which vary from the detection of common illnesses to the confirmation of serious diseases.

Probably not all of the current efforts in clinical diagnostics through analytical data are well represented in this issue, but we are convinced that the document that the readers have in their hands will definitely contribute to attracting research laboratories to pay attention to the clinical applications of their chemistries, and the possibility to contribute to human health through the development of well validated analytical methods suitable for a fast and clear diagnosis.

Readers can find in this issue of Analytical Methods the possibilities of the use of nanomaterials-based electrochemical inmunosensors as advanced diagnostic tools, the use of vibrational spectroscopy techniques to determine biochemical parameters in serum, cancer diagnostics, a spectral histopathology study of metastatic brain cancer, and point-of-care diagnostics of methotrexate, there are several studies on determinations to be made in serum and plasma, and interesting contributions to a deep evaluation of the clinical results.

We would like to express our thanks to all the authors and research teams that have contributed to this special issue, and to the whole community of the Royal Society of Chemistry and its Analytical Chemistry team, especially the editorial staff and to Dr May Copsey as Managing Editor, for their help in preparing this special issue of a journal which increases its influence on the analytical community year after year.

---