A wake-up call for the engineering and biomedical science communities

With the burst of Information Technology (IT) bubble at the beginning of this century, people are looking for the next wave of technology in which to invest. While we believe that biomedical applications and systems are this next stage, unfortunately, the engineering and bioscience communities are unprepared for the many challenges. In order to connect the engineering and the biomedical science communities, we established the LifeScience Systems and Applications (LiSSA) Technical Committee within IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2005--an initiative supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through a conference grant to enable dialogue between the engineering and biomedical science communities. Henceforth, we have organized several annual workshops with different themes on the NIH campus. After each workshop, a white paper is published in IEEE circuits and systems magazine to present the major challenges in various chosen theme areas. Recently, we chose "Biomarker Development and Applications" as our workshop theme. For the first time, we invited eight IEEE societies and various NIH institutes to send their representatives for face-to-face dialogue. This article presents the major challenges in biomarker development and applications based on the general consensus of the conference. The aim of the article is to serve as a wake-up call for more engineers to participate in crucial life-science application and systems research.