A research team from the Charité – Universitätsmediz in Berlin have developed a blood test to detect the state of a patient’s internal clock. It aims to helps physicians establish the optimal time for drug administration when the drugs would be most effective with the least side effects. This study was published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The research team claimed that the effectiveness of drugs depends on the time of administration on a personalized level. Their goal was to identify the biomarkers in blood to characterize the ‘internal time’ of an individual.

The overall activity of 20,000 genes in a specific blood cell-type throughout the day was measured in multiple participants. A specialized computer algorithm was used where around 12 genes were identified to report internal time in a reliable manner. These biomarkers in a single blood type could distinguish between the early and late types of patients to the extent of even determining whether they get up in the early morning since this practice works against the natural biological clock.

Professor Achim Kramer, the lead investigator from the university’s Institute for Medical Immunology stated about chronotherapy, “Such a therapy taking time of day into consideration has been rarely applied until now, since a simple diagnostic was unavailable; we think this novel objective test of internal time can contribute to time of day gaining more meaning in diagnosis and therapy.”