Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease can be confirmed presently only upon post-mortem examination of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in brain tissue. Developments in diagnostic imaging tools including MRI, PET and SPECT scans are enabling greater insight into these pathologies but these techniques are insufficient for disease stratification or early diagnosis and ideally would be employed alongside diagnostics tests for biochemical biomarkers of disease. Attempts to identify biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease have centred on the beta amyloid and tau pathologies characteristic of disease, but advances in genomic and proteomic technologies are facilitating a more complete approach to biomarker discovery. Here we discuss the impact such technologies could potentially achieve in Alzheimer's disease diagnostics.