Perspective pubs.acs.org/jmc
Metabolomics as a Challenging Approach for Medicinal Chemistry and Personalized Medicine Michel Frédérich,† Bernard Pirotte,‡ Marianne Fillet,§ and Pascal de Tullio*,‡ †
Laboratory of Pharmacognosy, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Medicines (CIRM), University of Liege, Quartier Hôpital, Avenue Hippocrate 15, B-4000 Liege, Belgium ‡ Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Medicines (CIRM), University of Liege, Quartier Hôpital, Avenue Hippocrate 15, B-4000 Liege, Belgium § Laboratory for the Analysis of Medicines, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Medicines (CIRM), University of Liege, Quartier Hôpital, Avenue Hippocrate 15, B-4000 Liege, Belgium ABSTRACT: “Omics” sciences have been developed to provide a holistic point of view of biology and to better understand the complexity of an organism as a whole. These systems biology approaches can be examined at different levels, starting from the most fundamental, i.e., the genome, and finishing with the most functional, i.e., the metabolome. Similar to how genomics is applied to the exploration of DNA, metabolomics is the qualitative and quantitative study of metabolites. This emerging field is clearly linked to genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. In addition, metabolomics provides a unique and direct vision of the functional outcome of an organism’s activities that are required for it to survive, grow, and respond to internal and external stimuli or stress, e.g., pathologies and drugs. The links between metabolic changes, patient phenotype, physiological and/ or pathological status, and treatment are now well established and have opened a new area for the application of metabolomics in the drug discovery process and in personalized medicine.
■
INTRODUCTION Metabolomics and Medicinal Chemistry. Metabolomics (sometimes referred to as metabonomics in the literature) is considered the most recently developed branch of “omics sciences,” following genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics (Figure 1). Its aim is the quantitative and qualitative study of a large variety of small-molecular-weight biomolecules (
