Focused metabolomic profiling in the drug development process: advances from lipid profiling

The highly parallel analytical technologies comprising 'omics promised to dramatically improve drug development efficiency by increasing knowledge and improving decision-making capabilities. On this point, the 'omics have largely been a disappointment. The major reason genomics, transcriptornics and proteomics fail to improve decision making capabilities is that they produce so many false positive results that it is difficult to be sure that findings are valid. Metabolomics is not immune to this problem but, when practiced effectively, the technology can reliably produce knowledge to aid in decision making. In particular, focused metabolomics platforms - those that restrict their target analytes to those measured well by the technology - can produce data with properties that maximize sensitivity and minimize the false discovery problem. The most developed focused metabolomics area is lipid profiling.