Pharma’s Cutting Edge

The headline article gives the impression that major drug companies missed the metabolomics boat when it sailed a few years ago. They didn’t. They’ve been exploring the technology since its use in clinical studies first became practical. Note that metabolomics can theoretically be used in tandem with proteomics and genomics (and even glycomics) to predict disease/drug response. More than one company is pursuing this tandem approach. See, for examples, BG Medicine, Health Discovery and Target Discovery. Leading metabolomics biomarker applications firms include Metabolon , ESA Biosciences, Phenomenome and Icoria.

Kudos to Pfizer and Affymetrix for being the first to support NIH’s GAIN initiative to sample a large number of genomes for SNPs and not with a trivial investment, either.