When Merck & Co. withdrew the painkiller Vioxx from the market last September after the drug was linked to increased risks of heart attack and stroke, more than one metabolomics researcher shook their heads and thought, "If only ...."
"The removal of Vioxx raises the question: Couldn't it have been possible to know earlier what the behavior of these drugs in vivo would have been?" says Steve Martin, senior vice president and chief technology officer of BG Medicine, a systems biology company in Waltham, Mass. "There is a real drive to apply [metabolomics] to get a much higher-resolution view much earlier of humans' responses to drugs," says Martin.
Metabolomics is the systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints that specific cellular processes leave behind. The field is relatively new, but the basic concept is not: Physicians have long understood that metabolites can reveal pathology.
To get a sense of just ...
