Gail Dutton
writes:
Applications extend beyond biotech to include such novel markets for
metabolomics as biofuels, nutrigenomics, agriculture, and food safety.
The greatest opportunities, however, are in pharmaceuticals and
diagnostics.
And quotes Marianna Tcherpakov at BCC Research:
“Like other omics, a metabolomics approach has big impacts in research
and product development, especially in the area of biomarker and drug
discovery applications,” Dr. Tcherpakov elaborates.“With advancements in
genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data collection and analysis, it
seems logical for a metabolomics discovery study to consider adding
results from those whenever possible.”
Getting information on the levels of intermediate compounds within cells is one of the key advantages of metabolomics, which like genomics, represents another very valuable way of getting another swath of data on the subject of research. Here's the big limitation, according to Anthony Walker:
The two greatest limitations to the growth of metabolomics ... are bioinformatics and research funding. “There aren’t
enough trained bioinformaticians available"
And like genomics, if metabolomic data is going to be used in new ways, a lot of data wrangling will be needed before metabolomics becomes mainstream.
