No matter what you call it, metabolic profiling is crucial to drug discovery and health.

“Genomics and proteomics remain incredibly rich sources of data, but their complexity and relative inaccessibility have prevented them from reaching their full potential as sources of drug targets,” says Alan Higgins, senior director of investigational medicine for Paradigm Genetics (www.paradigmgenetics.com), explaining the challenge drug development specialists face. “In addition, changes in genes and proteins do not always reflect changes in biological function, so it is difficult to identify mechanisms and establish cause and effect using these techniques alone.”

By comparison, he suggests, metabolic profiling provides more functional information at the biochemical level that researchers can use to see what pathways and mechanisms are altered by specific interventions or diseases. Thus, company scientists are putting a lot of time and resources into developing new tools and techniques to identify metabolic markers that will explain disease pathogenesis and serve as biochemical signposts during preclinical and clinical drug screening.

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