Discussion

Metabolomics has emerged as a powerful technology for providing biological insight into disease processes and for identifying biomarkers to diagnose, monitor, and treat disease, in part, because metabolomics provides a highly-sensitive and real-time assessment of health status. The utility of metabolomics is further expanded when combined with other ‘omics-based approaches. Integration of metabolomics and GWAS approaches has provided unprecedented insight into how genetic variation influences human metabolism, complex disease, and drug response. This combined GWAS/metabolomics approach has resulted in the generation of a network atlas or metabolic network, including a large number of novel associations, which provides a link between genes and disease phenotype. These results illustrate how metabolomics provides a powerful tool for understanding the molecular events that contribute to disease and help provide the groundwork for personalized medicine approaches that will enable a better understanding of the health status of the individual and their risk for disease.