Aside from diet and exercise, there are no FDA-approved therapies for NASH. The lack of a clear disease taxonomy and deep mechanistic understanding of the disease is a major hindrance to drug development. Metabolon’s ability to non-invasively screen for thousands of metabolites in just one biological sample makes it an ideal solution for assessing the metabolic state in order to understand complex phenotypes where drivers are numerous (i.e., genetics, environment and microbiota). The metabolome integrates an individual’s genetic makeup and gene expression profile with nongenetic factors such as diet, environmental exposures, and the microbiome. This is why layering metabolomic analysis onto genomic and transcriptomic data provides the best opportunity to understand disease.

Global untargeted metabolomics enables researchers to discover key changes or differences between conditions such as disease stages or drug treatments. This approach has the potential to produce not only fundamental insights into disease mechanism, but also actionable biomarkers that can be used to track disease severity and therapeutic efficacy.

NASH is a complex disease encompassing a complex amalgam of dysregulated pathways. That is why a narrow focus on individual markers like lipids or liver enzymes alone will not be enough to develop accurate diagnostics and discover actionable, disease-modifying drug targets. Leveraging global metabolomics as a wide-angle tool will support the development of non-invasive diagnostics and therapeutics that have the capability to improve patients’ lives.