Novel Diagnostics for Cancer and Cognition: An Eye on “Smart” Mechanistic Pathways of Proliferation and Regulation

The global population is aging to the extent that over 450 million individuals will be greater than 80 years of age by the year 2050. As a result, an increase in non-communicable diseases that involve cancer and cognition is impacting individuals throughout the world and presents significant clinical challenges for health care professionals. Early detection and the ability to monitor disease outcomes are critical for cancer and cognitive loss and warrant the need for novel “smart” diagnostics that go beyond the assessment of total disease burden. Such diagnostics can monitor mechanistic proliferative and regulatory cellular pathways that offer additional avenues to develop innovative treatment strategies in conjunction with their diagnostic value. Cellular pathways that involve Wnt signaling, Wnt1 inducible signaling pathway protein 1 (WISP1), sirtuins, and non-coding ribonucleic acids (RNAs) provide exciting opportunities for the development of innovative diagnostics founded on underlying disease mechanisms for cancer and dementia. These diagnostic pathways hold intricate relationships with one another that alter biological and clinical outcomes, can be differentially expressed, and may require panel assessment with artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms. Future work will require evaluation in clinical subpopulations with specific comorbidities that necessitate in-depth validation and standardization for clinical translation.