Oral Presentation Australian and New Zealand Metabolomics Conference 2018

Making Metabolomics More Affordable (#7)

David Wishart 1
  1. University of Alberta, Edmonton, ALBERTA, Canada

Metabolomics depends on some of the most expensive and sophisticated equipment known to science.  Most of the standard equipment, such as high resolution LC-MS and NMR spectrometers, is priced in the $500,000 to $1,000,000 range with some higher end instruments (i.e. Gigahertz NMR instruments) costing upwards of $10 million.  Not only is the equipment expensive, it is difficult to operate and maintain, with instrument operators typically requiring PhDs and years of training or experience.   This is creating a significant “barrier-to-entry” for metabolomics, with the cost of starting a metabolomics lab being so great that many new investigators or host universities are unable or unwilling to make the investment. These high costs are also turning away other would-be investigators or discouraging others from considering metabolomics as a worthwhile “omics” endeavor.  What is needed is a way of reducing the costs of metabolomics, especially targeted metabolomics. In this presentation I will describe a number of ideas and concepts my lab is working on to make metabolomics more affordable. In particular, I will present our progress on developing low-cost metabolomics kits (NMR, GC-MS and LC-MS) as a way of reducing instrument time and costs as well as a route to standardizing metabolomics methods and results. I will also describe our work to develop low-cost, portable or point-of-care metabolomic devices. These instruments, which will likely be priced at <$500, should allow a variety of targeted metabolomic assays to be rapidly performed at a cost of a few dollars per sample.  The instruments include both colorimetric devices as well as electronic impedance systems that could fit in the palm of your hand.  A number of ideas for future developments in this area of metabolomics devices will also be discussed.