Abstract

Plenary Lecture: The Role of Metabolic Profiling in Systems Medicine

Elaine Holmes, Professor, Imperial College London

Localised and systemic metabolic phenotypes in tissue compartments and biofluids are the products of gene-environment interactions and so are both statistically and biologically connected to disease risk factors, and individual patients responses to therapy. The fundamental paradigm of clinical metabolic phenotyping is that any localised metabolic, physical or histological perturbation in the human body will result in global, systems level changes, which are detectable by profiling hundreds or thousands of system parameters in biological samples such as urine, serum or tissue biopsies (intact or extracted). The pattern of these changes will be characteristic of the origin, behaviour and outcome of the original disease manifestation. Here new metabolic profiling and chemical imaging tools are explored in relation to their potential for molecular phenotyping and patient stratification focussing on a mixture of global and targeted assays. Examples are drawn from a range of clinical conditions including colon cancer, herpetology, infection and cardiovascular disease with emphasis on dynamic modelling of patients. Generation of analytical models can be embedded within the context of bioinformatic pipelines, using a range of statistical techniques for enhanced information recovery and variance reduction.