Applications of metabolic phenotyping in pharmaceutical research and development

Drug discovery and development is a long, complex and expensive process that has suffered lapses in productivity recently. A variety of new sciences and technologies has been applied in order to improve its productivity, especially in the drug discovery phase where much project attrition occurs and during which phase the drug structure is fixed. These new sciences and technologies include genomics, proteomics, high throughput screening, high-speed chemistry, and structural biology, all of which have had a positive role to some extent in improving the drug discovery process. In this Chapter, we will review the role that metabolic phenotyping, also known as metabonomics or metabolomics, can play in pharmaceutical research and development. Uniquely, metabolic phenotyping can impact upon every single phase of the long and complex drug research and development process. Increased implementation of metabolic phenotyping promises to deliver better decision-making across the process and also improve the low survival rates of some drug projects