Harnessing the Power of Pharmacometabolomics: The Metabolic Footprint of Statins.

It has been 30 years since the approval of lovastatin, the first commercially available statin by the US Food and Drug Administration. Since that time, the uptake in statin use has been remarkable, with over 1 in 4 United States adults now taking statins for hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular disease, and nearly half of adults estimated to be statin eligible based on the 2013 ACC/AHA cholesterol treatment guidelines.1,2 Clearly, the cardioprotective effects of statins are linearly related to LDL-C (low-density lipoprotein cholesterol) lowering.3 However, despite the widespread use of statins, the extent to which event reduction is directly related to LDL lowering, versus effects on other lipid subclass or even pleiotropic effects remains unclear. See Article by Kofink et al The emerging use of metabolomic platforms to interrogate metabolites broadly representative of human metabolism has the potential to unravel on- and off-target effects and lend new insights into drug responses, referred to as pharmacometabolomics.4 In this issue, Kofink et al5 illustrate the power of pharmacometabolomics, by …