ABSTRACT
Identifying target organ toxicity remains a primary objective of drug safety assessment. The more efficiently this can be done, the better. For example, can subchronic effects be detected with acute dosing, can the toxicity be detected in a
less invasive manner than histopathologic assessment of collected tissues, etc. The bulk of themetabonomic literature over the past 5-10 years is devoted to studying target organ toxicity; either at the diagnostic or mechanistic level. Not surprisingly, the two most well-studied organs are the liver and kidney, while there exists a relative paucity of data on other organs as studied by NMR. This chapter will review the extensive literature on liver and kidney. Furthermore, recent efforts on using metabonomics to study drug-induced vasculopathies are discussed. This represents a unique opportunity to address a toxicity that hampers pharmaceutical drug development and for which current methods are intensive and invasive, and for which no reliable, robust biomarkers exist.
