Chronic metabolic diseases with increasing prevalence and morbidity have posed serious challenges to the global healthcare system and medical economy. Despite the emergence of innovative therapies with promising therapeutic effects, there are still a number of clinical issues that need to be addressed, including but not limited to how to deal with poor even no effectiveness of first-line drugs, how conventional drugs could be repositioned for new diseases, and whether the multi-drug combination therapy could be cost-effective and beneficial to improve patients’ quality of life. Therefore, in order to improve the therapeutic effect of drugs for chronic metabolic diseases, it is pertinent to carry out comprehensive evaluation and research on drug indications for the nonresponsive patient group, benefits and risks of drug combination scheme, and also pharmacoeconomics for the treatment of chronic metabolic diseases.

The theme of this study will focus on the "clinical -- basic -- clinical" research pathway, which involves three key topics specifically: (1) Drug indications for chronic metabolic diseases; (2) Magnitude of clinical benefits of multi-drug combination and the underlying mechanism of such benefits; (3) Pharmacoeconomic evaluation of multidrug combination in chronic metabolic diseases. It aims to better understand the drug selection, interaction mechanisms of existing drugs, and clinical benefits and risks of available treatment options targeting metabolic diseases. The types of articles include but are not limited to experimental research related to the mechanisms of potential treatments (drugs, foods, Chinese prescriptions, etc.), as well as post-hoc analyses of clinical trials, and real-world studies.

This Research Topic aims to seek solutions to meet the clinical needs of drug therapy for chronic metabolic diseases. Specifically, we will focus on exploring the potential of new use of conventional drugs, investigating the treatment outcomes of alternative strategies for certain patient groups that have poor even no effectiveness of first-line drugs, analyzing the clinical benefits and risks of multi-drug combination, assessing the cost-effectiveness and other unsolved problems in clinical practice. It will cover intersecting fields, including the employment of evidence-based approaches to evaluate the treatments’ effectiveness and safety, pharmacoeconomic analysis to estimate the cost-effectiveness of drugs, new technologies of omics, big data analysis and artificial intelligence to identify the targetable biomarkers.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:
• Conventional drugs in new use: exploring the new treatment potential of traditional medicines (traditional Chinese medicine, Chinese prescription preparation, Indian medicine, etc) via drug combinations or drug repositioning; Specifically, only traditional medicines where active ingredients have been identified would be considered relevant.
• Discovery of new drugs: research and development of new drugs for metabolic diseases to improve effectiveness and alleviate adverse effects;
• Research on mechanism of drugs: investigation of the mechanism of clinical drugs, such as the influence on cell transporter, metabolic enzymes, and important biological events;
• Application of new technology: using new technology, new methods (e.g., research of omics, space metabolism, artificial intelligence analysis, single cell sequencing, etc.) to study the mechanism of drug interactions;
• Drug selection strategy: exploring the optimal drug use strategies; investigating the effectiveness and safety of innovative drugs through randomized controlled trials, observational studies and real-world studies;
• Pharmacoeconomic evaluation to assess the cost-effectiveness of existing treatments and provide implications for manufacturers and healthcare payers to support the policy-making and implementation;
• Evidence-based evaluation of drugs and health economics research: evaluating the effectiveness and safety of the combination of existing drugs through meta-analysis; developing clinical guidelines or health technology reports to synthesize the clinical evidence and generate recommendations for clinical practice.

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Frontiers in Endocrinology

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