Single-Cell Metabolomics for Drug Discovery and Development

Introduction

Despite the major efforts in modern drug discovery and development, the field is still in crisis with productivity increasingly declining. A major source of drug development failure is toxicity, where the adverse drug reaction is often caused by off-target effects of drug candidates that can be revealed only late in the drug development process.

Metabolomics as a Solution

Metabolomics has been proposed as an emerging promising approach to monitor off-target effects on metabolic enzymes or transporters, thus providing mechanistic understanding of drug toxicity.

Challenges in Metabolomics

However, there are multiple challenges in applying metabolomics in this context, including:

1. The inability to resolve the drug metabolic response on the single-cell level.

Project Proposal

In this PoC project, we propose to commercialize the technology of single-cell metabolomics developed in the ERC CoG project METACELL. Specifically, we propose using our single-cell metabolomics technology in conjunction with the data-driven metabolic modulation approach for:

• Revealing single-cell metabolic response
• Understanding the metabolic mode of action of drugs and drug candidates.