Department of Pediatrics, University of Padova, Padua, Italy.
Ital J Pediatr. 2009 Oct 23;35(1):30. doi: 10.1186/1824-7288-35-30.
In many fields of medicine there is a growing interest in characterizing diseases at molecular level with a view to developing an individually tailored therapeutic approach. Metabolomics is a novel area that promises to contribute significantly to the characterization of various disease phenotypes and to the identification of personal metabolic features that can predict response to therapies. Based on analytical platforms such as mass spectrometry or NMR-based spectroscopy, the metabolomic approach enables a comprehensive overview of the metabolites, leading to the characterization of the metabolic fingerprint of a given sample. These metabolic fingerprints can then be used to distinguish between different disease phenotypes and to predict a drug's effectiveness and/or toxicity.Several studies published in the last few years applied the metabolomic approach in the field of pediatric medicine. Being a highly informative technique that can be used on samples collected non-invasively (e.g. urine or exhaled breath condensate), metabolomics has appeal for the study of pediatric diseases. Here we present and discuss the pediatric clinical studies that have taken the metabolomic approach.
在许多医学领域，人们越来越感兴趣的是在分子水平上对疾病进行特征描述，以期制定出个体化的治疗方法。代谢组学是一个有前途的新领域，有望对各种疾病表型的特征描述以及识别可预测治疗反应的个体代谢特征做出重大贡献。基于质谱或基于 NMR 的光谱等分析平台，代谢组学方法可以全面概述代谢物，从而对给定样本的代谢指纹进行特征描述。然后可以使用这些代谢指纹来区分不同的疾病表型，并预测药物的有效性和/或毒性。过去几年发表的几项研究在儿科医学领域应用了代谢组学方法。作为一种非常有信息量的技术，可以对非侵入性采集的样本（如尿液或呼出的冷凝物）进行检测，代谢组学在儿科疾病的研究中具有吸引力。在这里，我们介绍并讨论了采用代谢组学方法的儿科临床研究。
