Release of White Paper: Big data lipidomics for lipid biomarker identification and drug discovery by Lipotype

18 July 2017

Dresden / Germany, 29 June 2017

Lipidomics is the large-scale study of lipids in biological systems. The analysis of large datasets, potentially containing up to thousands of lipidomes, is a challenging endeavour. Lipotype has released a white paper about “Big data lipidomics” which guides you through the data analysis process aiming at the identification of lipid biomarkers. Lipotype has established multiparametric statistical approaches, tailored to analyse lipid data. These methods are geared to identify lipid biomarkers. In this white paper a cohort of healthy subjects is compared with a cohort of diseased persons to identify lipid signatures that discriminate health from disease. Such signatures could potentially be useful for disease stratification and for diagnosis by means of predictive modelling (machine learning).

World-renowned lipid expertise provides guidance to analyse big datasets

Lipotype has expertise in lipids, lipid metabolism, lipid chemistry and lipidomics. Lipotype is a spin-off company from the Kai Simons and Andrej Shevchenko labs of the world-renowned Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. As Prof. Kai Simons, CEO of Lipotype, explains: “We treat lipids not as isolated entities but as collectives in metabolic networks that serve functions in physiology and disease.” Lipotype has established algorithms and a full set of methods tailored to quantitative lipid data. This platform has been developed to perform both statistical analysis and enrichment analysis in order to identify lipid biomarkers.

Major challenge to extract the relevant information

“When working with lipidomic datasets consisting of hundreds of lipid parameters in potentially thousands of samples, a major challenge is to extract the relevant information.”, says Dr. Mathias Gerl, Head of Bioanalytics and Data Analysis at Lipotype. Dr. Gerl adds: “In the new white paper about big data lipidomics, we will guide you through our data analysis process aiming at the identification of biomarkers and the testing of their performance.”

Applications of big data lipidomics

With the big dataset lipidomics procedures developed by Lipotype, it is now possible to identify and validate lipid biomarkers (pharmacodynamic, pharmacokinetic, CDx) for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry as well as (pre-) clinical research. Lipid biomarkers can be used for clinical diagnostics (prognostic, diagnostic, patient stratification). “Big data lipidomics can also be applied for identification of novel, lipid-related therapeutic targets and mode-of-action studies in drug discovery phases. Other applications are for intervention studies for the development of functional food/nutraceuticals as well as for cosmetic claim support for (active) ingredients for cosmetic industry.”, says Dr. Oliver Uecke, Head of Business Development and Finance at Lipotype GmbH.