Defining the UK Roadmap for Biomedical Metabolic Phenotyping

During the past decade the UK has built analytical and informatics national capabilities to support large-scale metabolic phenotyping projects. Many institutions have established metabolomics facilities to conduct in house and collaborative analysis. However, in part due to its rapid growth and also the highly multidisciplinary nature of this field, the UK metabolic phenotyping landscape, in terms of end users, remains fragmented. There is a significant growing need amongst our biomedical, epidemiological and clinical researchers to access metabolomics analysis for their studies, but for most setting up a platform in house is not practical or advisable. Many utilise different platforms and approaches, and no common standards in terms of analytical approaches or processing workflows currently exist, although the international Phenome Centre network (driven from the UK) is redefining that landscape.

The overall aim of this retreat was to bring together clinical, epidemiological and biomedical scientists, technologists, bioinformaticians, chemometricians/biostatisticians, industry scientists, trainers and funders to: (i) raise awareness of, and to define current needs for metabolic phenotyping; (ii) raise awareness of existing state-of-the-art UK national capability for metabolic phenotyping; (iii) identify grand challenges for clinical and basic metabolic research; and (iv) define a program of research, technology development and training provision, that is a Roadmap for Biomedical Metabolic Phenotyping in the UK.

Scientific programme committee