Metabolomics as a Truly Translational Tool for Precision Medicine

Abstract

Metabolomics is unique among omics technologies in being applicable to metabolism and toxicity studies broadly across organisms (e.g., humans, other mammals, model organisms, and even bacteria) and across biological materials (e.g., blood, urine, saliva, biopsy, and stool), including cultured cells and subcellular fractions. Metabolomics can be used to characterize biologic response patterns in humans as well as to support mechanistic studies in model systems and ex vivo studies. A broad range of resources are available, including publicly accessible data repositories (e.g., Metabolomics Workbench), tools for biostatistics and bioinformatics (e.g., MetaboAnalyst), metabolite identification (e.g., Metlin), and pathway analysis (e.g., Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes). Thus, metabolomics is more than a promise of the future; metabolomics is already available as a translational approach to facilitate precision medicine. This ACT Symposium review will contain an introduction to metabolomics in toxicity studies followed by sections on translational metabolic networks, translational metabolite biomarkers of acetaminophen-induced acute liver injury, translational framework using high-resolution metabolomics for integrated pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, and precision medicine applications: extracting actionable targets from untargeted metabolomics data following one year in space.

Metabolomics, Microbiota, and In Vivo and In Vitro Biomarkers in Type 2 Severe Asthma: A Perspective Review

“…In contrast to NMR, the detectability of a metabolite in MS depends on the ionization efficiency that is influenced by the sample composition and by analyte separation before the mass analyzer. The coupling of different platforms with different ionization and/or chromatographic strategies has been recently applied to detect untargeted metabolomic signatures in food allergy and asthma [4,12].…”

Exploring the mechanism of Shendi Bushen capsule in anti-renal fibrosis using metabolomics theory and network analysis

“…Metabolomics 13 is an emerging science that studies the composition, distribution, and spatiotemporal dynamic changes of metabolites in organisms. By examining the changes of metabolites in the body caused by pathophysiological stimulation or disturbance of the biological system, the metabolic pathways of the biological system can be studied.…”

An anchored experimental design and meta-analysis approach to address batch effects in large-scale metabolomics

“…Untargeted metabolomics studies compare the variation in metabolites caused by genetic perturbations, treatments, and environmental differences ( Liu and Locasale, 2017 ). Metabolomics is a powerful tool in biomarker discovery and holds great promise for precision medicine ( Peng et al, 2015 ; Burgess, 2021 ; Schmidt et al, 2021 ). Targeted metabolomics is common in studies exploring human health questions that range from aging ( Jones et al, 2012 ; Hastings et al, 2019 ) to complex diseases ( Lewis et al, 2008 ; van der Sijde et al, 2014 ; Menni et al, 2017 ; Barupal et al, 2018 ; Rahman et al, 2021 ; Sindelar et al, 2021 ).…”