Services development
Applications
Pharmaceutical applications
Metabolomics can play a key role in drug development and discovery, from the identification of biomarkers for safety or toxicity, through to drug efficacy and action mechanism studies.
In-vivo endogenous metabolic profiles are compared before and after drug administration, revealing markers of drug toxicity / efficacy. Xenobiotic drug metabolites can also be investigated in the same experiment. As toxicities can be species specific, one of the main aims of that application of metabolomics is the identification of bringing biomarkers that extrapolate the potential toxicity of a drug from laboratory models to humans. The earlier a drug fail, the less expensive it is.
Additional applications are the early identification of especially susceptible population to toxicity or adverse effects from a drug or the determination through the “personalized medicine” the recommended treatment for a patient.
- Reactive Metabolite Screening
Reactive metabolite formation is an important factor in the understanding of drug toxicity. Analytical methods have been validated in our laboratory for the assessment of reactive metabolite formation from toxic drugs in human hepatocytes.
Clinical applications
Metabolomics delivers new tools for healthcare. Biomarker discovery, as the alteration of endogenous metabolites between a control and a particular phenotype, plays an important role in fields as disease diagnosis, disease progression, treatment assessment or prediction of response to treatment. Aspects as non-invasive sampling and the therapy selection prior the treatment not only benefit patients, but also potentially reduce costs in healthcare system.
Two different approaches to this application are commonly employed at OWL:
- Targeted metabolic profiling experiments: an array of metabolites known to be involved in a given biochemical pathway are analysed. This procedure is optimised by performing recovery experiments on representative quantities of each metabolite throughout the analysis procedure. Specialised procedures for the determination of methionine cycle metabolites involved in liver related pathologies have been validated in our laboratory for serum and tissues samples.
- Metabolic fingerprinting: all detected components are included in the analysis, providing more holistic approach to exploring the multiple factors governing a biological organism.
Nutricional applications
As human health is also influenced by diet, measuring the projected effects of short-term diet on long-term health outcomes allows metabolomics to understand the diet – health relationship. Additionally, retrospective studies can correlate long-term food consumption with disease susceptibility.