Point-of-care metabolomics: concordance of benchtop and high-field NMR for non-invasive physiological profiling

High-field nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is a powerful and highly reproducible platform for serum metabolomics, but its technical complexity and maintenance requirements have limited its implementation in routine clinical environments. Benchtop NMR spectrometers offer a simpler and more accessible alternative, although their lower magnetic field strength reduces spectral resolution and sensitivity. Here, we evaluated whether an 80 MHz Fourier benchtop NMR spectrometer can reproduce clinically relevant metabolic information obtained with a 600 MHz IVDr high-field platform. Serum samples from two independent cohorts were analyzed using both NMR platforms under comparable conditions. We compared platform-specific metabolic and lipoprotein signatures against a broad panel of non-invasive clinical biosensors. Despite yielding fewer quantified variables than the 600 MHz platform, the 80 MHz spectrometer captured a highly similar clinical association landscape, preserving both the direction and magnitude of most metabolite-biosensor relationships. Finally, an 80 MHz partial least-squares regression model accurately predicted the 600 MHz-derived MetSCORE, a continuous NMR-based metric of metabolic syndrome risk, achieving strong agreement between platforms. These findings demonstrate that benchtop NMR can preserve clinically meaningful metabolic information despite reduced spectral granularity, supporting its potential use as a scalable tool for translational metabolomics and clinical risk stratification.