Precision metabolomics and biomarker-driven nutrition in companion animals: a comprehensive review of emerging research

Precision nutrition, a discipline once limited to human personalized health, has rapidly emerged as a transformative paradigm in companion animal science. Recent advances in metabolomics, microbiome analysis, multi-omics integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) have created unprecedented opportunities to formulate diets tailored to an individual animal’s metabolic profile rather than relying solely on population-level nutrient requirements. This review summarizes the most recent (2020–2025) developments in pet metabolomics, including blood, urine, fecal, salivary, hair, and skin metabolic biomarker discovery; their association with health outcomes; and their relevance in designing biomarker-driven diets for dogs and cats. The integration of metabolomics with microbiome sequencing, wearable biosensors, dietary response prediction algorithms, machine learning-based disease risk scoring, and emerging commercial tools in personalized pet nutrition is also examined. The review concludes with research gaps, regulatory implications, and future directions, including metabolomic passports, dynamic diet optimization, precision amino-acid balancing, microbiome-modulatory formulations, and AI-driven individualized feeding systems. Precision metabolomics is poised to redefine the scientific and commercial landscape of pet nutrition over the next decade.

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