Pharmacometabolomics: Applications and Challenges

Background: Individual drug response arises from the interplay between genes and the environment. Pharmacometabolomics, is an alternative, but complementary discipline to pharmacogenomics, aiming to predict or evaluate response to treatment. Methods: Data for this perspective article were identified by searches of PubMed and references from relevant articles using the search terms "pharmacogenomics", "pharmacometabolomics", and "personalized medicine". Only articles published in English between 2002 and 2015 were included. Results: This perspective article on pharmacometabolomics focuses on the current applications of this holistic approach and presents the challenges that still need to be met. Conclusion: The merge of pharmacogenomics with pharmacometabolomic data, rapidly and efficiently, remains a significant challenge. No doubt, a “pharmacometabolomics-informed pharmacogenomic” strategy is anticipated to enable our in-depth understanding of individual variations in drug response phenotypes and hence, the design of individualized therapeutic approaches via the prediction of metabotypes.