Simplify Metabolic Disease Complexity and Improve Clinical Success with Metabolomics - Part 3

By Dr. Andrea Eckhart

Metabolic disease including type II diabetes, is rapidly expanding health care concern.  Diabetes burden continues to increase (430M in the US by 2030). Existing drugs for treatment of hyperglycemia in type II diabetes (T2D) fall short of achieving accepted treatment goals and the need for future therapies to achieve greater glycemic control, mitigate CV risk, and attenuate microvascular complications is constant.

Metabolic disease disrupts normal metabolism, resulting in altered systemic physiology. A challenge posed by metabolic diseases is that they are often present for years prior to becoming clinically apparent. An important goal in biomarker investigation in the cardiometabolic disease space is to identify individuals at risk prior to the onset of overt systems and to identify additional concomitant diseases thus enabling better clinical management.

Metabolic disease continues to be a formidable challenge because of its complexity. Early identification is difficult prior to overt damage and it is difficult to manage because of the complex intertwining of co-morbidities.1,2 There is a challenge of brining new drugs to market, often attributed to a deficit between pre-clinical knowledge and clinical efficacy, which illustrates the need for better translatability of preclinical research to the population of patients likely to benefit. Metabolomics is an approach that can help to address these issues.