Chapter 2 - Metabolomics for personalized medicine

Abstract

Diseases cause perturbation of the host’s immune system in which genes, proteins, and metabolites are involved. While genes are regulated by epigenetic or other host factors, proteins undergo posttranslational modifications to exhibit its functionality. As a result, it becomes difficult to correlate the disease phenotype based on genetic and proteomic information only. Metabolites provide direct information on the biochemical activity during diseased state. Therefore metabolites can be considered as phenotypic signature of a diseased state. Measuring metabolites in large scale falls under the omics technology known as metabolomics. Metabolic profiling in biological fluids can be used as biomarkers of disease or drug response. In addition, metabolomics together with genomics can be used to differentiate patients with differential treatment response. Thus metabolomics can be used as biomarker for patient stratification and personalized drug formulation. However, these are complicated steps and identification of a robust biomarker requires involvement of multidisciplinary fields ranging from technological development, involvement of researchers from computer science, bioinformatics, biostatistics, and validation of data among different demographic regions. In this chapter we discuss different technologies that are used for detection of different metabolites and challenges associated with implementation of the technique for personalized medicine.