Clinical Lipidomics: A Critical Approach for Disease Diagnosis and Therapy

Abstract

Clinical lipidomics is an important merging discipline to integrate clinical medicine and lipid science for diagnosis and therapy of human disease. The clinical lipidomics is defined as a new integrative biomedicine to discover the correlation and regulation between a large scale of lipid elements measured and analyzed in liquid biopsies from patients with those patient phenomes and clinical phenotypes. One of the important and challenging issues in clinical lipidomics is to define the disease specificity of dyslipidemia and lipid dysregulation. The comparison of lipidomic profile difference between target disease and healthy as well as related diseases is a common approach to perform lipidomics in patients. It is challenging to define the disease specificity of lipids and lipid metabolism, especially for those lipid species and their abundances. The heterogeneity of lipidomic profiles between different diseases is more obvious than that between different stages or severities of one disease. It is a challenge to validate the stage or severity specificity of selected biomarkers and targets. In order to improve the understanding of disease mechanisms in multiple dimensions, clinical lipidomics should/must be merged with clinical phenomes, e.g. patient signs and symptoms, biomedical analyses, pathology, images, and responses to therapies. We believe clinical lipidomics will become one of the most important and helpful approaches during the design and decision-making of therapeutic strategies for individuals.