Metabolomics Facility officially in operation
The Metabolomics Facility of Leiden University is now officially in operation to prevent disease and to improve health throughout the human lifespan.
In many diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, changes in metabolism already occur at an early stage, even before there are any symptoms. Metabolomics research makes changes in metabolism visible, which in turn will make it possible in future to establish diagnoses better, faster and earlier, as well as to predict the effect of different methods of treatment.
In this way researchers hope to be able to determine which diabetes patients run the highest risk of suffering kidney failure, or to establish whether a specific drug can prevent kidney failure in a given patient. One area that Leiden researchers are working on is the early detection of Alzheimer’s and methods for preventing this brain disease in future.
Personalised medicine
Research has shown that patients react to drugs differently. Metabolomics is an important technology for the further development of personalised medicine or in other words: customised treatment. For example, Leiden researchers recently identified a biomarker that may predict whether a person will develop arrhythmias and is likely to require a defibrillator.
Collaboration and sharing
The Metabolomics Facility is the fruit of collaboration between the Natural Products Laboratory of the Institute of Biology Leiden and the BioMedical Facility of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research and it thereby offers a unique combination of fields of expertise.
The facility will be used by the LUMC, the Erasmus Medical Centre, leading clinics such as the Mayo Clinic, and a number of BioScience Park companies, including Astellas, ZF-screens, Inovo, and the Centre for Human Drug Research. There are also international collaborations with companies such as Janssen Pharmaceutical and Unilever.
Links
- Natural Products Laboratorium, IBL
- Biomedical Facility, LACDR
- Arrhythmias research, LUMC