Sapient Announces Expanded, Enhanced Metabolite Identification Capabilities

Sapient, announced a major advancement in its mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and lipidomics services. Sapient has generated an industry-leading commercial standards library, encompassing more than 10,000 chemical reference standards enriched for key human and preclinical metabolic pathways, biochemical processes, and disease drivers, and spanning more than twelve chemical superfamilies. The standards have been extensively analyzed using Sapient’s state-of-the-art mass spectrometry infrastructure to generate robust, multi-parameter data enabling rapid, high-accuracy ‘Tier 1+’ identification of more than 1,000 metabolites and lipids routinely found in human biosamples. Sapient’s Tier 1+ identifications exceed industry-accepted criteria for Tier 1 metabolite identification set forth by the Metabolomics Standards Initiative (MSI) by using three orthogonal chemical parameters to confirm identity, including reference retention time (RT), MS1 mass-to-charge ratio (m/z), and MS2 chemical fingerprint. Together this data enhances the speed, quality, and extent of Sapient’s metabolite identification capabilities so more statistically significant metabolites and lipids can be effectively interrogated and advanced to validation studies.

Increasing the scale and accuracy of metabolite identification has critical scientific value for Sapient’s clients. A chemically identified molecule can be linked to biological processes and pathways to elucidate its role in health, disease, and drug response, explains Dr. Mo Jain, Founder and CEO of Sapient. “Nontargeted metabolomics and lipidomics methods now allow us to capture thousands of small molecules in a single sample, but increasing the number of ‘known’ or identifiable molecules found in these discovery screenings has been a challenge for the industry, thus limiting the translatability of findings,” he said. “What’s truly exciting is with the breadth and depth of data that we have now collected, we are able to identify more compounds than ever before, with the highest levels of confidence. We’ve made significant investment in compiling the data needed so our biomarker discoveries can be quickly made actionable and advance our clients’ drug development programs.”

In addition to providing a greater number of definitive compound identifications, Sapient can leverage its extensive standards database to elucidate more ‘unknown’ molecules and advance novel discoveries. The data was generated for a diverse range of chemical standards, from endogenous human metabolites to plant-derived small molecules, and molecules originating from food and food additives, FDA approved drugs, environmental toxicants, and pollutants. “If a molecule of interest is not an exact match in our database, we can still identify structural similarities to our reference standards, which helps us better understand its chemistry and biological role and brings greater confidence to the analysis,” said Dr. Saumya Tiwari, Co-Founder and Head of Computational Chemistry at Sapient. “We’ve generated MS2 data for all these standards, and collectively now have more than 6 million MS2 spectra for 600,000 compounds that we can perform matches against to structurally elucidate and confidently annotate yet-identified metabolites and lipids. The increase in both discovery potential and translatability is quite significant.”

“Our goal is to help our clients rapidly discover and validate the most biologically important signals in their samples, whether they are known molecules or yet to be mapped,” said Dr. Jain. “The expansion of our metabolite identification capabilities gives us unmatched ability to unlock the insights that small molecule biomarkers hold and ensure the findings are reproducible to confidently progress their study.”