Diagnostics

The prediction of diseases is of extreme value. In many cases a disease will be only identified once it has come to severe symptoms. In other cases diagnostic tools are not robust enough or are linked to high costs and/or time investment. Thus identifying a biomarker for a disease is of high interest, especially when a biomarker can predict the disease at a very early stage or even before burst. Metabolic biomarkers have been identified to have high potential, for example for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or prostate cancer.

Personalized Medicine

Medication to treat a specific disease is ideally genotype independent. Recent studies have, however revealed that ethic and gender related genotypic differences have an effect on disease treatment by medication. Medical treatment thus needs to be carefully monitored to determine optimal medical treatment and dosage. Metabolomics is able to resolve such information from any type of sample, e.g. body tissues or body fluids like blood or urine.