The role of pharmacometabonomics in predicting drug pharmacokinetics

Individual variability in drug response is a key challenge in current clinical practice and in drug discovery and development. Pharmacological response is closely associated with drug concentration at the site of action and therefore knowledge of drug pharmacokinetics is vital to delivering effective therapy. In addition to genetic polymorphisms, environmental factors also play an important role in determining drug efficacy, safety, metabolism and pharmacokinetics. The newly emerging field of pharmacometabonomics uses information from pre-dose metabolite profiles to predict individual drug responses, can be sensitive to both genetic and environmental factors and thus has great promise to help the future delivery of personalized medicine. This article introduces pharmacometabonomics and covers its application to the prediction of pharmacokinetics.