Metabolomics: Tools to unlock the human phenome could be the key to precision medicine

Aaron Hudson, vice president of marketing and clinical diagnostics, SCIEX, writes an expert view on the science that is often considered “closest to the phenotype.”

Healthcare is evolving and getting more personal; who you are, what you eat, where you live, and your lifestyle choices all have an impact on your overall health and wellbeing. When things go wrong, your individual characteristics could influence which treatment options are going to be effective. This has led researchers to seek treatments that are tailored to the individual patient and/or patients based on their sex or ethnic group.

Yet despite major advances in our understanding that patient treatments need to be individualized, the slow rate of identification of disease biomarkers and targets has led to a lack of new drug approvals for many illnesses, such as Alzheimer's disease, and an inability to determine which drugs will work for specific populations except in limited cases.