Emerging role of metabolomics in rheumatology

The pursuit for understanding disease pathogenesis, in this age of rapid laboratory diagnostics and fast-paced research, has led scientists worldwide to take recourse in hypothesis-free approaches for molecular diagnosis. Metabolomics is one such powerful tool that explores comprehensibly the metabolic alternations in human diseases. It involves study of small molecules of less than 1 kD in size by either LSMS or nuclear magnetic resonance. Unlike genomics, which tells us what may have happened, metabolomics reflects what did happen. The NMR technique has an advantage of analyzing metabolites without sample preparation, thereby diminishing artifacts, is less cumbersome and with the latest database on Metabolome; about 30 000 metabolites can be identified. The study of metabolomics for several rheumatic diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, osteoarthritis and vasculitis, has revealed distinctive metabolic signatures. Thus, metabolomics is a technique that promises precision medicine with better biomarkers, robust predictors of drug response and of disease outcome, discovery of newer metabolites and pathways in disease pathogenesis, and finally, targeted drug development. This review intends to decipher its relevance in common rheumatic diseases.