Lipidomics in drug development

Numerous human pathologies, including common conditions such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, inflammatory disease and neurodegeneration, involve changes in lipid metabolism. Likewise, a growing number of drugs are being developed that directly or indirectly affect lipid metabolic pathways. Instead of classical and cumbrous radiochemical analyses, lipid profiling by mass spectrometry (MS)-based lipidomics holds great potential as companion diagnostic in several steps along the drug development process. In this review we describe some typical lipidomics set-ups and illustrate how these technologies can be implemented in target discovery, compound screening, in vitro and in vivo preclinical testing, toxicity testing of drugs, and prediction and monitoring of response.