Abstract

Pharmacometabonomics: An Important New Paradigm for Precision Medicine

Jeremy Everett, Professor, University of Greenwich

Many medicines are ineffective or unsafe in significant portions of their patient populations. A key thrust for 21st Century healthcare is to develop more personalized drug treatments such that patients receive medicines that both efficacious and safe. This paradigm is also known as precision medicine. Current personalised medicine approaches rely heavily on the analysis of the genomes of the patients or the organisms that infect them. However, this approach has had less impact and success than was anticipated. Metabonomics is a new ‘omics science that is concerned with the analysis of metabolite profiles, especially in animal or human biofluids or tissues, and the response of those metabolite profiles to interventions such as exercise, drug treatment or gene mutation. Interest in metabonomics is very high at present as it is realized that metabolite profiles are influenced not just by genetic factors but also by environmental factors such as nutrition, health status and critically, microbiome composition. Pharmacometabonomics is an even newer development that enables the prediction of the metabolism, safety, efficacy or pharmacokinetics of a drug in an animal or human, based on analysis of pre-dose metabolic profiles. This talk will cover both the development and applications of pharmacometabonomics in pre-clinical and clinical settings and explore its utility in personalized medicine.