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Metabolic Profiling and Fingerprinting

Disease, drugs (and other biologically active molecules) perturb concentration and fluxes in intermediary metabolic pathways. The response involves adjustment of intracellular and extra cellular environments in order to maintain homeostasis. Both perturbation and adjustment are expressed as changes in the normal patterns in bio fluids of tissues that are characteristic (a ‘fingerprint’) of the nature of the site of the disease process, toxic insult, and pharmacological response of genetic modification. These patterns can be evaluated using spectroscopic techniques combined with multivariate statistical methods to gain insight into the response of a biological system to these perturbations in a time-related manner.