High-throughput screening, metabolomics and drug discovery.

The science of metabolomics has the potential to deliver wide-reaching benefits to the currently embattled pharmaceutical industry. Current applications for this field center around toxicological profiling and biomarker studies; however, the ability of metabolomics to quantitatively assess pharmacologically induced changes in biological systems at the phenotype level suggests that there would be value in its adoption at much earlier phases of the drug-discovery process. As is argued herein, this approach could be coupled with a re-organization of early drug-discovery paradigms to reduce both the rates of attrition and the costs of bringing a drug to market.