Introducing the NEW Oxysterols Targeted Panel From Metabolon

Oxysterols are intermediates in the development of bile acids, steroid hormones, vitamin D3, and other bioactive markers of inflammation and other disease states.

Oxysterols—oxidized products of sterols—are bioactive intermediaries that are associated with certain diseases, and further research is required to understand their role in disease pathogenesis. Oxysterols have the potential to influence many conditions from cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis, to Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and cancer. This suggests that further research and understanding of oxysterols may help to better understand these conditions.

Solving Challenges Related to Sensitivity

A thorough understanding of a disease phenotype is crucial for effective treatment, and metabolomic research into the possible causes of a disease is the next step in the fight for disease prevention. Unfortunately, detecting and identifying oxysterols in untargeted metabolomics can be challenging, and custom assay development is a typical approach to quantifying specific analytes as part of wider research.

Choosing an extensive targeted metabolomics provider can offer you confidence in routine quantitation of oxysterols for your research.

Metabolon’s Solution for Oxysterols Analysis

The Metabolon Oxysterol Targeted Panel measures 12 oxysterols and related sterols of biological significance. Our validated method of oxysterol detection and identification in human plasma samples may enable you to gain additional insights in your research—helping you to discern whether oxysterols are a significant biomarker for a disease state or inflammatory response within your study and whether their detection can potentially be used as a precursor for medical screening.

Working With Metabolon

With over 20 years’ experience helping commercial and academic studies gain insights from metabolomic analyses and with over 2000 citations in scientific journals, Metabolon is leading the way in applied metabolomics solutions worldwide.

From study design to sample collection, report visualization to biological interpretation, Metabolon’s experts guide you every step of the way. We give our customers confidence in the data deliverables of any metabolomic study, and we also offer insights into the data so that you can more easily make conclusions and plan your future research more decisively.

Quality is at the core of everything we do. We strictly adhere to quality standards and regulations, clinical laboratory practice guidelines, and FDA and EMA validation guidelines, where applicable, so you can be confident in our ability to match your quality standards.

LLOQ*
Analyte	Serum/Plasma (ng/mL)
24-hydroxycholesterol	10.0 ng/mL
27-hydroxycholesterol	20.0 ng/mL
Desmosterol	100 ng/mL
7-dehydrocholesterol	100 ng/mL
8-dehydrocholesterol	25.0 ng/mL
Lathosterol	200 ng/mL
5α, 6α-epoxycholesterol	15.0 ng/mL
4β-hydroxycholesterol	5.00 ng/mL
Cholesterol	0.125 mg/mL
Lanosterol	10.0 ng/mL
5α, 6β-dihydroxycholestanol	10.0 ng/mL
7α, 27-dihydroxycholesterol	10.0 ng/mL

*Lower Limit of Quantitation (LLOQ) varies for each sample type.

Analysis Method and Instrumentation:
LC-MS/MS (Agilent 1290 UHPLC/Sciex QTrap 5500 and 6500+)

Sample Type and Required Amounts
Sample Type	Sample Requirements
Plasma/Serum	100 to 150 µL

Others on request

• 7-dehydrocholesterol
• Lathosterol
• Desmosterol
• 8-dehydrocholesterol
• 24-hydroxycholesterol
• 27-hydroxycholesterol
• 4β-hydroxycholesterol
• 5α,6α-epoxy cholesterol
• Cholesterol
• Lanosterol
• 5α,6β-Dihydroxycholestanol
• 7α, 27-dihydroxycholesterol

Inflammation
The importance of inflammation in the development of multiple diseases- and health-related conditions including neurodegeneration, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease is undisputed. Metabolomics can inform on inflammatory processes by providing a readout of the small molecules of an organism, tissue, biofluid, etc. This allows for direct molecular phenotyping of inflammation beyond the standard protein markers of typical assays. Metabolon offers several targeted assays, including oxysterols, fatty acids, kynurenine/tryptophan, and a range of others (central carbon, glucose tolerance, branched-chain amino acids, b-hydroxybutyrate) that can also inform on overall cardiovascular health that is often linked with inflammatory processes.

Cardiovascular Disease
Heart failure is a leading cause of death worldwide, and there are numerous factors that lead to this and other cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Metabolomics can illuminate cardiovascular disease at multiple levels. In preclinical studies, such as with cardiomyocytes or heart tissue from model organisms, understanding mitochondrial function, energetics, and redox status can drive critical insights into disease mechanism. In human studies, metabolomics offers the opportunity to account for well-established CVD risk factors such as cholesterol and complex lipids, while simultaneously profiling thousands of other biochemicals in an unbiased fashion to enable the discovery of novel disease mechanisms and biomarkers.

Neuroscience
It is well-established that a low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet (KD) can help treat refractory epilepsy, which affects more than a third of epileptic patients who don’t respond to existing anticonvulsive drugs. What scientists haven’t understood until recently is how this kind of diet translates to brain activity. The answer for this aspect of epilepsy lies in the gut microbiome. There are many other neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, Parkinson’s disease and more. While so much remains to be understood about brain science, we do know that metabolomics is uniquely poised to understand the brain because of the ability of metabolites, small molecules, to cross the blood-brain barrier providing unique insights.

Diabetes
Diabetes is a serious metabolic condition affecting more than 37 million Americans and 460 million people worldwide according to the most recent report from the Centers for Disease Control. Despite being a worldwide epidemic, much remains unknown about individual risk factors for diabetes development, and research is currently being done to identify new and effective treatments for diabetes at all stages. By facilitating the assessment of specific metabolic pathways impacted by diabetes, targeted metabolomics can be a critical tool used to identify biomarkers of disease development for early intervention and novel targets to control disease progression, as well as for the development of new pharmaceuticals with specific mechanisms of action.

Cancer
Dysregulated metabolism is essential for the growth and proliferation of individual cancer cells, but the physiology of the patient is as much a part of the equation as the tumor. Metabolomics can both identify cancer-specific drug targets and assess the patient’s phenotype more broadly, addressing key questions such as: Who will respond to the therapy? How can we expand the pool of responders? How can we predict adverse events? Overall, metabolomics informs decision-making and positions development programs for success by providing a functional readout of the molecular phenotype.