Single-Cell Metabolomics for Drug Discovery and Development

Despite the major efforts in the modern drug discovery and development, the field is still in its crisis with the productivity increasingly declining.

A major source of drug development failure is the 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 was proposed as an emerging promising approach to monitor off-targets effects on metabolic enzymes or transporters thus providing mechanistic understanding of drug toxicity.

However, there are multiple challenges in applying metabolomics in this context including the inability to resolve the drug metabolic response on the single-cell level.

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 and metabolic mode of action of drugs and drug candidates.