Clinical lipidomics: a new way to diagnose human diseases

Lipidomics is a measurement of a large scale of lipid species to understand roles of their carbon atoms, dual bonds, or isomerism in the lipid molecule. Clinical lipidomics was recently defined “as a new integrative biomedicine to discover the correlation and regulation between a large scale of lipid elements measured and analyzed in liquid biopsies from patients with those patient phenomes and clinical phenotypes”. The first step to translate lipidomics into clinical lipidomics is to settle a number of standard operation procedures and protocols of lipidomics performance and measurement. Clinical lipidomics is the part of clinical trans-omics which was coined as a new emerging scientific discipline where clinical phenomes are integrated with molecular multiomics. We believe it is the time to translate lipid science and lipidomics into clinical application and to understand the importance of clinical lipidomics as one of the most helpful approaches during the design and decision-making of therapeutic strategies for individuals. We emphasize here that clinical lipidomics should be merged with clinical phenomes, e.g. patient signs and symptoms, biomedical analyses, pathology, images, and responses to therapies, although it is difficult to integrate and fuse the information of clinical lipidomics with clinical phenomes. It will be a great achievement if we can draw the networks of lipidomic species fused with networks of genes and proteins to describe the molecular mechanisms of the disease in multi-dimensions.