Pharmacokinetics/pharmacometabolomics-pharmacodynamics reveals the synergistic mechanism of a multicomponent herbal formula, Baoyuan decoction against cardiac hypertrophy

A pseudo-targeted metabolomics for discovery of potential biomarkers of cardiac hypertrophy in rats

Cardiac hypertrophy (CH) is one of the stages in the occurrence and development of severe cardiovascular diseases, and exploring its biomarkers is beneficial for delaying the progression of severe cardiovascular diseases. In this research, we established a comprehensive and highly efficient pseudotargeted metabolomics method, which demonstrated a superior capacity to identify differential metabolites when compared to traditionaluntargeted metabolomics. The intra/inter-day precision and reproducibility results proved the method is reliable and precise. The established method was then applied to seek the potential differentiated metabolic biomarkers of cardiac hypertrophy (CH) rats, and oxylipins, phosphorylcholine (PC), lysophosphatidylcholine (LysoPC), lysophosphatidylethanolamine (LysoPE), Krebs cycle intermediates, carnitines, amino acids, and bile acids were disclosed to be the possible differentiate components. Their metabolic pathway analysis revealed that the potential metabolic alterations in CH rats were mainly associated with phenylalanine, tyrosine and tryptophan biosynthesis, phenylalanine metabolism, arachidonic acid metabolism, citrate cycle, glyoxylate and dicarboxylate metabolism, and tyrosine metabolism. In sum, this research provided a comprehensiveand reliable LC-MS/MS MRM platform for pseudo-targeted metabolomics investigation of disease condition, and some interesting potential biomarkers were disclosed for CH, which merit further exploration in the future.

LC-MS-Based Metabolomics Reveals the Mechanism of Protection of Berberine against Indomethacin-Induced Gastric Injury in Rats

Berberine is a natural isoquinoline alkaloid with low toxicity, which exists in a wide variety of medicinal plants. Berberine has been demonstrated to exhibit potent prevention of indomethacin-induced gastric injury (GI) but the related mechanism remains unclear. In the present study, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)-based metabolomics was applied for the first time to investigate the alteration of serum metabolites in the protection of berberine against indomethacin-induced gastric injury in rats. Subsequently, bioinformatics was utilized to analyze the potential metabolic pathway of the anti-GI effect of berberine. The pharmacodynamic data indicated that berberine could ameliorate gastric pathological damage, inhibit the level of proinflammatory factors in serum, and increase the level of antioxidant factors in serum. The LC-MS-based metabolomics analysis conducted in this study demonstrated the presence of 57 differential metabolites in the serum of rats with induced GI caused by indomethacin, which was associated with 29 metabolic pathways. Moreover, the study revealed that berberine showed a significant impact on the differential metabolites, with 45 differential metabolites being reported between the model group and the group treated with berberine. The differential metabolites were associated with 24 metabolic pathways, and berberine administration regulated 14 of the 57 differential metabolites, affecting 14 of the 29 metabolic pathways. The primary metabolic pathways affected were glutathione metabolism and arachidonic acid metabolism. Based on the results, it can be concluded that berberine has a gastroprotective effect on the GI. This study is particularly significant since it is the first to elucidate the mechanism of berberine's action on GI. The results suggest that berberine's action may be related to energy metabolism, oxidative stress, and inflammation regulation. These findings may pave the way for the development of new therapeutic interventions for the prevention and management of NSAID-induced GI disorders.

Pharmacokinetics in Pharmacometabolomics: Towards Personalized Medication

Indiscriminate drug administration may lead to drug therapy results with varying effects on patients, and the proposal of personalized medication can help patients to receive effective drug therapy. Conventional ways of personalized medication, such as pharmacogenomics and therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM), can only be implemented from a single perspective. The development of pharmacometabolomics provides a research method for the realization of precise drug administration, which integrates the environmental and genetic factors, and applies metabolomics technology to study how to predict different drug therapeutic responses of organisms based on baseline metabolic levels. The published research on pharmacometabolomics has achieved satisfactory results in predicting the pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and the discovery of biomarkers of drugs. Among them, the pharmacokinetics related to pharmacometabolomics are used to explore individual variability in drug metabolism from the level of metabolism of the drugs in vivo and the level of endogenous metabolite changes. By searching for relevant literature with the keyword "pharmacometabolomics" on the two major literature retrieval websites, PubMed and Web of Science, from 2006 to 2023, we reviewed articles in the field of pharmacometabolomics that incorporated pharmacokinetics into their research. This review explains the therapeutic effects of drugs on the body from the perspective of endogenous metabolites and pharmacokinetic principles, and reports the latest advances in pharmacometabolomics related to pharmacokinetics to provide research ideas and methods for advancing the implementation of personalized medication.

Metabolomic Approach to Screening Homozygotes in Chinese Patients with Severe Familial Hypercholesterolemia

Homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HoFH) is a rare inborn-errors-of-metabolism disorder characterized by devastatingly elevated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and premature cardiovascular disease. The gold standard for screening and diagnosing HoFH is genetic testing. In China, it is expensive and is always recommended for the most likely HoFH subjects with aggressive LDL-C phenotype. However, the LDL-C levels of HoFH patients and a substantial proportion of heterozygous FH (HeFH) patients overlapped considerably. Here, we performed a cost-effective metabolomic profiling on genetically diagnosed HoFH (n = 69) and HeFH patients (n = 101) with overlapping LDL-C levels, aiming to discovery a unique metabolic pattern for screening homozygotes in patients with severe FH. We demonstrated a differential serum metabolome profile in HoFH patients compared to HeFH patients. Twenty-one metabolomic alterations showed independent capability in differentiating HoFH from severe HeFH. The combined model based on seven identified metabolites yielded a corrected diagnosis in 91.3% of HoFH cases with an area under the curve value of 0.939. Collectively, this study demonstrated that metabolomic profiling serves as a useful and economical approach to preselecting homozygotes in FH patients with severe hypercholesterolemia and may help clinicians to conduct selective genetic confirmation testing and familial cascade screening.