Metabolomics Study Leading To Better Disease Biomarkers.

BioWorld International Correspondent

NORWICH, UK - Recent efforts to optimize metabolomics technology are beginning to bear fruit in the discovery of novel biomarkers for disease. In general, the concentrations of metabolites are amplified relative to the proteins that prompted their formation, making them potentially more sensitive, both in diagnostics and as drug targets, than protein biomarkers.

"Metabolites are downstream from the protein, so you must have an amplification in concentration," Douglas Kell, director of the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology, said at the BA Science Festival last week. "Furthermore, you don't need to know the gene …