Discovery metabolomics and lipidomics

Gain an unprecedented view into dynamic factors that modulate health, disease pathobiology, and drug response across individuals.

Uncover the functional biology behind observed phenotypes.

Comprehensive measurement of the human metabolome is essential to explain phenotypic variability among individuals who share similar genetic backgrounds, clinical diagnoses, or lab values.

Our rapid, high-throughput discovery metabolomics services provide a robust framework to map, at population-scale, the dynamic landscape of chemical variation in humans – elucidating novel disease mechanisms and physiological states.

Enabling statistically-powered discovery

Optimized metabolite identification.

>13K reference standards to maximize IDs

DynamiQ™ insights enabled.

Unique ability to cross-validate biomarker discoveries in our molecular-clinical database

discovery metabolomics services

Discover more with mechanistic context. Validate what others can only hypothesize.

Enabling metabolite and lipid biomarker discovery and validation at an entirely new speed and scale.

Small molecule biomarkers read out non-genetic factors and exposures that cannot be captured with traditional omics approaches, providing a rich resource for discovery of novel biology. Our proprietary rapid liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (rLC-MS) systems enable robust profiling of this complex chemistry at scale to decipher dynamic disease biology.

Our rLC-MS systems can handle diverse sample types from plasma and serum to tissue, urine, CSF, cells, media, and other matrices.

Contextualize and extend biomarker discoveries with DynamiQ insights.

discovery metabolomics services

Given the dynamic complexity of small molecule biomarkers, it is critical to understand how they behave across populations of individuals representing different lifestyles, geographies, disease states, and timepoints.

Sapient’s DynamiQ™ Insights Engine enables just that. Comprised of rLC-MS-generated metabolomics data and matched EHR data from 67,000+ longitudinally collected human plasma samples, we can assess metabolite and lipid biomarker changes across diverse patients and over time to uncover dynamic drivers of disease and drug response.

dynamiq biomarker insights

Dynamic insights to decipher disease biology & drug response.

We provide a scalable way to rapidly map functional metabolic states in humans, going beyond the genome to resolve phenotypic variability.

Translatable biomarker findings to confidently advance discoveries.

Sapient leverages our extensive metabolite identification capabilities and DynamiQ reference datasets to rapidly build functional evidence.

Multi-omic integration for any development phase.

As a comprehensive multi-omics partner, we can generate additional omics datasets in your same samples for deeper molecular insights.

APPLICATIONS IN ACTION

What Discovery Metabolomics Reveals About Human Biology

Explore key use cases in which discovery metabolomics can answer questions traditional omics cannot, from defining biologically distinct human subpopulations to uncovering distinct disease mechanisms.

Customized to your biological questions.

You can leverage our discovery metabolomics services at any phase of the drug development pipeline, from early discovery to preclinical studies through clinical trials.

What are you looking to identify?

The right patient.

The right disease.

The right therapy.

discovery metabolomics services discovery lipidomics

Why small molecule biomarkers?

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Mapping Human Metabolic Diversity with Foundation Models: A DynamiQ Approach

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What Discovery Metabolomics Reveals About Human Biology

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Marker of the Month | Creatinine

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Sapient publishes breakthrough rLC-MS metabolomics study in over 26,000 samples, revealing metabolic aging clock and disease insights

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Plasma Lipid Metabolites, Clinical Glycemic Predictors, and Incident Type 2 Diabetes

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Lysosomal dysfunction and inflammatory sterol metabolism in pulmonary arterial hypertension

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Improving metabolite identification in nontargeted metabolomic and lipidomic studies

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How deep immune phenotyping via small molecule biomarkers could change the way we diagnose and treat autoimmune diseases

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Small Molecule Biomarkers + Adaptive Clinical Trials: Optimize Dosing & Timing of Treatments

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What’s Next in Precision Medicine? Small Molecule Biomarkers to Personalize Disease Prediction, Diagnostics and Therapies

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Fierce Pharma Feature: Small molecule biomarkers to align patients, disease, and therapy

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Genomic + Small Molecule Biomarkers: for a More Complete Picture of Disease Risk

Sapient’s discovery metabolomics platform is powered by proprietary rapid LC–MS (rLC‑MS) technology, engineered for both metabolome coverage depth and high throughput. In a single analytical run, our workflows capture over 15,000 metabolites and lipids, enabling comprehensive coverage of metabolic pathways at a scale and pace that traditional metabolomics approaches cannot achieve. This combination of breadth and efficiency unlocks biomarker discovery efforts that were previously impractical due to time, cost, or sensitivity constraints.

To ensure the biomarkers we identify are biologically meaningful and clinically relevant, we pair deep profiling with rigorous metabolite identification. Our in‑house library of more than 13,000 chemical reference standards – curated across core human pathways, biochemical processes, and disease mechanisms – allows us to move beyond features and confidently assign molecular identities.

Most importantly, Sapient is uniquely positioned to translate discovery into real‑world insight. As the only multi‑omics partner with a proprietary molecular‑clinical database – DynamiQ™ – comprising nontargeted metabolomics data from over 67,000 human samples, we can not only analyze your study samples, but also contextualize and independently validate candidate biomarkers across large, diverse human cohorts – strengthening confidence in their relevance and specificity.

Traditional molecular profiling approaches (genomics, proteomics) remain insufficient to explain phenotypic variability among individuals who share similar genetic backgrounds, clinical diagnoses, or lab values. Discovery metabolomics data, through the capture of metabolites and lipids, provides the most direct readout of physiological activity, capturing the dynamic biochemical processes that drive disease and therapeutic response.

With this data, researchers can begin to ask:

  • Why do some patients respond to a given therapy and others don’t?
  • What exposure signals modify genetic risk?
  • Which biological processes actually differ between phenotypically similar people?
  • Which metabolic signals precede clinical disease, and what contributes to disease progression?

You can also explore our metabolomics case studies and data published in collaboration with our clients.

Sapient’s metabolite identification capabilities have been developed to maximize definitive identifications for a study and elucidate more unknown molecules to advance novel discoveries.

As such, we have generated multi-parameter rLC-MS data on >13,000 chemical reference standards, enabling us to assign MSI Tier 1 identification to up to 1,400 metabolites and lipids measured in plasma and tissue biosamples. All identified compounds undergo rigorous quality control including visual inspection of peak shape and retention time consistency across all samples, as well as confirmation that no identified compound represents an isotope, adduct, or in-source fragment of another signal.

For those molecules that remain unannotated, Sapient leverages our database of over 6 million MS2 spectra across 850,000+ compounds to provide putative structural insights for hundreds to thousands of additional metabolites, enabling advancement of novel discoveries.

DynamiQ offers a population‑scale molecular and clinical reference dataset designed to validate and biologically interpret insights generated from your study. By enabling analyses across independent human cohorts, DynamiQ supports confirmation of biomarker signals, exploration of disease progression, interrogation of biomarker–disease relationships, and discovery of biologically meaningful patient subgroups.

DynamiQ can also be applied upstream of experimental work. Using our deeply characterized, pre‑existing datasets, we can help you explore hypotheses, evaluate potential biomarkers, and run virtual analyses in human cohorts – guiding refinement of study design and target prioritizatio before generating new data.

When relevant, we include biological contextualization analyses in DynamiQ for the key biomarker(s) of interest observed in your discovery metabolomics study. We can also further tailor bespoke analyses to delve deeper into specific characterization and modeling using our DynamiQ data.

Ready to discover more?

Submit a question or discovery metabolomics study request via the form, or click the button below to schedule a meeting with our scientists.

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