Metabolomics as a Challenging Approach for Medicinal Chemistry and Personalized Medicine

Abstract

"Omics" sciences have been developed to provide a holistic point of view of biology and to better understand the complexity of an organism as a whole. These systems biology approaches can be examined at different levels, starting from the most fundamental, i.e., the genome, and finishing with the most functional, i.e., the metabolome. Similar to how genomics is applied to the exploration of DNA, metabolomics is the qualitative and quantitative study of metabolites. This emerging field is clearly linked to genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. In addition, metabolomics provides a unique and direct vision of the functional outcome of an organism's activities that are required for it to survive, grow, and respond to internal and external stimuli or stress, e.g., pathologies and drugs. The links between metabolic changes, patient phenotype, physiological and/or pathological status, and treatment are now well established and have opened a new area for the application of metabolomics in the drug discovery process and in personalized medicine.

Metabolomic Study on Idiosyncratic Liver Injury Induced by Different Extracts of Polygonum multiflorum in Rats Integrated with Pattern Recognition and Enriched Pathways Analysis

“…Metabolomics is generally a kind of phenotype-guided study, aiming to link phenotypic characterization of multifactorial diseases or drug toxicity with metabolomics profiles or changes (Ramautar et al, 2013; Frederich et al, 2016). In the present study, we discovered that EA extract was the main component associated with Heshouwu-induced idiosyncratic hepatotoxic phenotype, on the basis of the background of LPS-induced minimal inflammation.…”

A Novel Anti-Hepatitis C Virus and Antiproliferative Agent Alters Metabolic Networks in HepG2 and Hep3B Cells

“…A workflow using NMR-based metabolomics was proposed that was envisaged as improving the efficiency and success rate of drug discovery [31]. These concepts have been further developed in which metabolomics was envisaged to have utility in biomarker identification, mechanism of action, drug candidate efficacy and safety, patient selection and stratification, and treatment and patient follow-up, all assisting in the drug discovery and development process [32]. It is in the spirit of these recent discussions that we undertook a metabolomic investigation of the lead molecule compound 3b compared to its parent molecule diflunisal.…”

“…These findings are novel, not only in relation to compound 3b, but also to the effects of drugs on hepatoma cells in general. Future studies of drug effects on cultured tumor cells should include a metabolomic component in order to understand the effect of the drugs on intermediary metabolism, especially if such studies are part of a high-throughput screening protocol within the drug discovery and development process [31,32]. …”

metaX: a flexible and comprehensive software for processing metabolomics data

“…The most prevalent technology used in analysis of metabolomics is non-targeted mass spectrometry (MS) coupled with either liquid chromatography (LC-MS) or gas chromatography (GC-MS) [2, 3]. Generally, these techniques generate a set data of mass spectra with chromatography that includes retention time, peak intensity and chemical masses.…”