How Metabolomics Findings Can Drive New Therapeutic Approaches?

Dear Colleague,

Metabolism alteration is thoroughly involved in diverse pathologies from neurological diseases to cancer, as a direct consequence of the primary pathophysiological mechanisms, or as an indirect process of disease evolution and/or patients’ management. For example, modifications of lipid metabolism, mitochondrial impairment, or glucose intolerance have been largely described in neurodegenerative diseases as well as glycolysis modification in cancer. The omics studies have progressed for many years for the technical aspects and have also enlarged the putative clinical consequences. They have helped in the better knowledge of the metabolic pathways involved in these diseases and have provided hypotheses about their link with the main pathophysiological ways like inflammation or oxidative stress. In regard to diseases with poor or ineffective therapeutics, many research groups are focused on the development of new strategies of treatment or new compounds based on metabolic targets.  Importantly metabolic perturbations linked to the disease or to new treatments or specific diet (i.e., ketogenic diet, vitamin supplementation,…) may play a prognostic role in these diseases.

In this context, it seems crucial to know how the increased practice of “omics” (mainly metabolomics and lipidomics...) in in vitro, in vivo, and clinical studies may improve our capacity to identify new therapeutic targets, to follow the underlying and, perhaps, hidden effects of a given treatment.  We also should pay attention to the subtle effects of changing diet, for example, to use this strategy in addition to other drugs or to use metabolism status to determine the subgroups of patients. Thus omics approaches have many interests in health care, mainly to identify diagnosis and prognosis biomarkers but we have to keep in mind the ability to develop and monitor new therapeutic strategies based on its findings.

Accordingly, metabolomics and lipidomics studies that enabled to characterize subgroups of patients in clinical trials merit to be discussed in the special issue. Works reporting metabolomics/lipidomics approaches that have identified therapeutic targets, or studies evaluating through in vitro or in vivo experiments metabolic treatments directly targeting a metabolic pathway (glucose or lipid metabolism, respiratory chain,… ) are relevant to highlight new opportunities of omics. Finally, reports of deleterious indirect consequences of metabolic disturbances associated with a treatment or a diet and that could play an important prognosis role, would be interesting for this special issue. 

Prof. Dr. Helene Blasco
Prof. Dr. Patrick Emond
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Metabolites is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.