Industrial application of metabolomics for personalized medicine: Current status and challenges

Disability (DALYs) related to noncommunicable diseases and postinfection of communicable diseases have increased over the past several years. Conventional treatment strategy is focused on one drug or a group of drugs to treat the whole population. But, half of the prescribed drugs failed to show adequate clinical benefits. As a result, current treatment strategy is changing toward personalized medicine. A patient-tailored treatment strategy requires identification of robust biomarkers that can be used in clinical translation of disease stage, drug repurposing, new drug formulation, drug safety and toxicity, develop diagnostics kits or devices, and reproducibility. Genome sequencing, which is one of the omics technologies, is used in identifying mutation in the gene of the patient and biomarkers of different types. However, metabolomics, which is another omics technology, provides closest phenotype of the patient, as metabolites can be detected from the biological fluids and collected in a noninvasive process. Therefore identification of robust biomarkers requires integration of both genomic and metabolomic data. With the advancement of high-throughput technologies, industries, clinics, and researchers from multidisciplinary fields are trying to improve the personalized medicine sector toward prevention of diseases. These are contributing to the global market size of personalized medicine. Although challenges exist for industries in commercialization of personalized products, there are different types of products that have been approved by regulatory bodies and are already in use by clinicians.