Medical Engineering Defense, Anne Kil

Saliva is emerging as a powerful biofluid for noninvasive diagnostics, offering a window into human health through its diverse biomolecular composition. This dissertation advances the field of salivary biomedicine by addressing critical challenges in saliva collection, processing, and analysis. First, a comparative analysis of five saliva collection devices highlighted key usability factors, informing the development of SalivaStraw — a novel device designed to improve collection efficiency and minimize leakage. Next, to facilitate scalable saliva processing, colosseum, a low-cost, open-source fraction collector, which can enable automated saliva fractionation, enhancing downstream proteomic analyses by improving biomarker isolation and assay reproducibility. Finally, a computational framework leveraging spline regression was applied to longitudinal salivary transcriptomic data, enabling the identification of temporally regulated genes and underscoring saliva's potential for dynamic health monitoring. Collectively, this work contributes new tools and methodologies that strengthen the foundation of saliva-based diagnostics, broadening its applications in precision medicine and beyond.