See how Sapient’s discovery lipidomics services significantly amplify your ability to discover dynamic biomarkers of health, disease, and drug response.
Designed to identify novel lipid biomarkers without restricting the search to a predefined panel, discovery lipidomics is meant to provide unbiased, large-scale analyses of the lipid molecules circulating in human samples. The challenge has been achieving this broad coverage at a speed that makes such discovery screenings efficient and viable for drug development.
That’s where Sapient has innovated. Our discovery lipidomics services, powered by next-generation mass spectrometry, finally provide a way to broadly and rapidly profile the tens of thousands of lipids and metabolites in human samples – with the speed to process thousands of samples at a time – to rapidly probe a larger chemical landscape in which robust biomarkers can be identified.
Each lipidomics run captures more than 15,000 small molecule biomarkers in a single analytical pass, spanning polar metabolites, polar lipids, and nonpolar lipids. This breadth is essential for unbiased discovery, as constraining the measurement of lipid biology constrains the result.
This speed makes statistically powered, population-scale studies operationally and economically feasible – a prerequisite for identifying lipid biomarkers that are robust across the heterogeneity of real-world patient cohorts.
Covering instrument function, data quality, and sample integrity, we continuously monitor hundreds of quality control parameters to differentiate our lipidomics services: delivering not only a feature-rich dataset, but a defensibly translatable one – enabling downstream biomarker candidates to withstand independent replication.
Supported by an advanced biocomputational framework for analysis of lipidomics data and other integrated omics, preclinical, and clinical datasets, we deliver actionable insights to elucidate disease mechanisms, subtype diseases, and ultimately improve the precision and efficacy of therapies.
Explore how our lipidomics services can deliver unique insights to accelerate your studies.
"*" indicates required fields
rLC-MS is Sapient’s proprietary mass spectrometry platform, engineered to overcome the throughput bottleneck of conventional LC-MS. Its capability for deep metabolomic and lipidomic profiling at population scale has been demonstrated in an analysis of over 26,000 plasma sample.
Sapient’s discovery lipidomics method can be applied across diverse sample types, including plasma, serum, tissue, urine, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), cells, and media – allowing studies to be designed around the most biologically relevant matrix without compromising platform performance.
Sapient’s proprietary database, comprising rLC-MS-generated data from >67,000 longitudinally collected human plasma samples, functions as a population-scale validation layer: lipid biomarker candidates identified in a sponsor’s study can be cross-checked against independent, real-world cohorts to assess specificity and clinical association before further confirmatory work.
Targeted lipid panels measure a fixed, predefined set of lipids – fast and quantitative, but inherently limited to known biology. Discovery lipidomics is panel-free: it captures the broadest possible lipid landscape per sample, allowing identification of previously unrecognized biomarkers and pathways that targeted assays cannot, by design, detect.
Our discovery lipidomics services leverage our rLC-MS platform to capture more than 15,000 small molecule biomarkers per sample in a single analytical run, spanning polar metabolites, polar lipids, and nonpolar lipids. This breadth supports unbiased coverage of the human lipidome and is delivered in under one minute of analytical cycle time per sample.
rLC-MS – rapid liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry – is Sapient’s proprietary platform that compresses the LC-MS analytical cycle to under one minute per sample without sacrificing molecular coverage. The throughput unlocks population-scale lipidomics studies with thousands of samples, which is required to identify lipid biomarkers robust across heterogeneous real-world patient populations.
Sapient runs discovery lipidomics screening in under one minute per sample, with throughput to process thousands of samples per day. For sponsor cohorts of several thousand samples, this enables a statistically powered discovery analysis on timelines that conventional LC-MS workflows cannot match.
Genomics defines risk; it rarely defines the active biological state of disease in an individual. More than 80% of disease risk is non-genetic, driven by factors like diet, microbiome, exposures, aging, and treatment that the genome alone cannot capture. Lipids and other small molecule biomarkers integrate those exogenous influences in real time, providing a direct readout of the dynamic biology that drives disease onset, progression, and therapeutic response. That is the layer of evidence drug development programs have, until recently, lacked the throughput to map at scale.
Candidate lipid biomarkers identified in a sponsor’s study are cross-validated in DynamiQ™, Sapient’s proprietary molecular-clinical database of rLC-MS data from more than 67,000 longitudinally collected human plasma samples paired with EHR annotations. This independent validation layer assesses biomarker specificity as well as disease and clinical associations to confirm translatability before further development investment occurs.
