Is the clinical lipidomics a potential goldmine?

Linlin Zhang, Xianlin Han, Xiangdong Wang

Clinical lipidomics is a new extension of lipidomics to study lipid profiles, pathways, and networks by characterizing and quantifying the complete lipid molecules in cells, biopsy, or body fluids of patients. It undoubtfully has more values if lipidomics can be integrated with the data of clinical proteomic, genomic, and phenomic profiles. A number of challenges, e.g., instability, specificity, and sensitivity, in lipidomics have to be faced and overcome before clinical application. The association of lipidomics data with gene expression and sequencing of lipid-specific proteins/enzymes should be furthermore clarified. Therefore, clinical lipidomics is expected to be more stable during handling, sensitive in response to changes, specific for diseases, efficient in data analyses, and standardized in measurements, in order to meet clinical needs. Clinical lipidomics will become a more important approach in clinical applications and will be the part of "natural" measures for early diagnosis and progress of disease. Thus, clinical lipidomics will be one of the most powerful approaches for disease-specific diagnosis and therapy, once the mystery of lipidomic profiles and metabolic enzymes is deciphered.