Metabolomics as a Promising Resource Identifying Potential Biomarkers for Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Abstract

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a relapsing chronic disorder of the gastrointestinal tract characterized by disruption of epithelial barrier function and excessive immune response to gut microbiota. The lack of biomarkers providing early diagnosis or defining the status of the pathology difficulties an accurate assessment of the disease. Given the different metabolomic profiles observed in IBD patients, metabolomics may reveal prime candidates to be studied, which may help in understanding the pathology and identifying novel therapeutic targets. In this review, we summarize the most current advances describing the promising metabolites such as lipids or amino acids found through untargeted metabolomics from serum, faecal, urine and biopsy samples.

Targeted 1H NMR metabolomics and immunological phenotyping of human fresh blood and serum samples discriminate between healthy individuals and inflammatory bowel disease patients treated with anti-TNF

“…The use of NMR metabolomics of several types of samples including biofluids, intestinal biopsies, or feces for diagnosis and monitoring of IBD, has been recently reviewed [ 17 ]. In some cases, the comparison between remission and active patients resulted in a good PLS-DA modeling, with the identification of several discriminant metabolites such as N-acetylated compounds and amino acids such as phenylalanine [ 27 ].…”

“…The identification of disease markers in a biofluid not only offers practical clinical information concerning the risk, diagnosis, and/or prognosis of the disease [ 11 , 12 ] but also detects altered metabolic pathways that could lead to a better understanding of the disease and/or to select a plausible target for a therapy. Some successful examples in which NMR metabolomics has proven useful in the detection of disease biomarkers include cancer [ 12 , 13 ] including colorectal cancer, [ 14 ], IBD [ 15 – 17 ], CD [ 18 , 19 ], and UC [ 19 ] just to refer to some recent studies. Moreover, it can replace invasive diagnostics such as colonoscopy [ 20 ].…”

Fat of the Gut: Epithelial Phospholipids in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases

“…These head groups define physical and chemical properties of an individual phospholipid and membrane structures dependent on the phospholipid content. The relation between physical structure of phospholipids and their function is well described in a recent review [ 64 ], and may be the key to lipid metabolism-associated pathologies [ 65 , 66 , 67 ].…”

Metabolic Host–Microbiota Interactions in Autophagy and the Pathogenesis of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)

“…Administration of bacterial metabolites themselves has been investigated as a potential means by which IBD can be treated in a manner consistent with in vivo regulation of intestinal homeostasis [ 12 ]. As previously discussed, IBD patients display distinct metabolite patterns that reflect, in part, the microbial dysbiosis that accompanies intestinal inflammation, with particular metabolites offering promising avenues for intervention [ 178 ]. One such metabolite is butyrate, a microbial-derived metabolite demonstrated to be protective in animal models of IBD [ 179 ].…”