title: Metabolomics in pharmaceutical research and development: metabolites, mechanisms and pathways.
abstract: In recent years, quantitative metabolomics has played increasingly important roles in pharmaceutical research and development. Metabolic profiling of biofluids and tissues can provide a panoramic view of abundance changes in endogenous metabolites to complement transcriptomics and proteomics in monitoring cellular responses to perturbations such as diseases and drug treatments. Precise identification and accurate quantification of metabolites facilitate downstream pathway and network analysis using software tools for the discovery of clinically accessible and minimally invasive biomarkers of drug efficacy and toxicity. Metabolite abundance profiles are also indicative of biochemical phenotypes, which can be used to identify novel quantitative trait loci in genome-wide association studies. This review summarizes recent experimental and computational efforts to improve the metabolomics technology as well as progress towards in-depth integration of metabolomics with other disparate 'omics datasets to build mechanistic models in the form of detailed and testable hypotheses.
authors.affiliation: Department of Safety Assessment, Merck Research Laboratories, West Point, PA 19486, USA.
authors.forename: Ethan Y
authors.initials: EY
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: William H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Schaefer
authors.forename: Qiuwei
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004345:Drug Industry / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D055432:Metabolomics / Q000379:methods*; D019906:Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Biomolecular; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations / Q000097:blood / Q000378:metabolism* / Q000652:urine
chemical_list: D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations