Metabolomics Facility

The Metabolomics Platform is a joint research facility created by URV (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain) and CIBERDEM (Spanish Biomedical Research Network in Diabetes and Associated Metabolic Disorders). The Metabolomics Platform is part of IISPV (Pere Virgili Health Research Institute), a major medical research organization that undertakes numerous research initiatives in the country. The main goal of the Metabolomics Platform is to offer metabolomic services to the biomedical and clinical research groups from CIBERDEM and URV. The main vision of the Metabolomics Platform is not only act as a measurement facility but to offer metabolic consulting, trying to get fully involved in the metabolic-related experiments proposed by the groups. This means that the collaboration should start from the very beginning of the study (definition of goals, dimension and characteristics of the sample set, metabolic experimental design) until the very end (data processing and interpretation), helping to obtain sound, significant and useful clinical results for the different research groups willing to use the facility services. The equipment available in high field NMR allows high throughput analytical measurements of body fluids i.e., serum, urine as well as tissue or biopsies analysis of humans and/or animal models (i.e., rats, mice, etc.). The use of advanced statistical, chemometric, multivariate and artificial intelligence algorithms will allow turning large measurement datasets into useful clinical information. These techniques allow performing what is generally known as metabolic fingerprinting or profiling. The diagnosis of metabolic related illnesses and risk evaluation on large population studies, are the major concerns of the platform together with the identification of metabolic pathways or involved biomarkers in metabolic related diseases. Although specially addressed to the needs of CIBERDEM and URV groups, the Metabolomics Platform welcomes any biomedical research group to contact its members for scientific collaboration proposals or/and metabolomic services.