Metabolomic signatures for drug response phenotypes: Pharmacometabolomics enables precision medicine

The scaling up of data in clinical pharmacology and the merger of systems biology and pharmacology has led to the emergence of a new discipline of Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology (QSP). This new research direction might significantly advance the discovery, development, and clinical use of therapeutic drugs. Research communities from computational biology, systems biology, and biological engineering - working collaboratively with pharmacologists, geneticists, biochemists, and analytical chemists - are creating and modeling large data on drug effects that is transforming our understanding of how these drugs work at a network level. In this review, we highlight developments in a new and rapidly growing field - pharmacometabolomics - in which large biochemical data-capturing effects of genome, gut microbiome, and environment exposures is revealing information about metabotypes and treatment outcomes, and creating metabolic signatures as new potential biomarkers. Pharmacometabolomics informs and complements pharmacogenomics and together they provide building blocks for QSP.