Faculty of Metabolites are small molecules that play important roles in every cellular process and are often disrupted by diseases when they can be biomarkers acting as key disease indicators at the individualised level and detect a disease at the early stage before the development illness. The emergence of innovative, -omics technology, such as metabolomics, now allows strategies to identify altered metabolites to act as sensitive biomarkers of disease. Blood and urine contains multitude, unstudied, and unknown biomarkers. In the dog there have been few investigations to assess the potential of metabolomics to enhance the diagnostic process. In this project a metabolomic approach will investigate the value of biomarkers in two common and serious diseases of dogs; (a) the infectious disease of babesiosis and (b) non-infectious idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (iDCM).
The goals of the project are to discover novel biomarkers of kidney and cardiac malfunction in dogs leading to more precise and adequate diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of these diseases; to perform non-targeted/targeted metabolomics analysis on the sera and urine of dogs with uncomplicated and complicated form of babesiosis, as well dogs with diagnosed iDCM; to identify novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers; to assess metabolomic profiles before and after therapy with the ImizolR, in order to identify novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers of acute kidney injury (AKI) in dogs; to expand the pathway signalling research to improve understanding of pathogenesis of these diseases; to improve the treatment of each individual patient on the basis of metabolomics fingerprints, resulting in enhanced patient care; to introduce novel biomarkers in regular use for veterinary clinical medicine; to spread innovative, technology in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine; to introduce metabolomics in veterinary medicine in Croatia; to increase the research potential and skills of researchers in molecular veterinary medicine, and to facilitate the inclusion of veterinary molecular science into Croatia.