Discovery of plasma biomarkers for colorectal cancer diagnosis via untargeted and targeted quantitative metabolomics

Abstract

Dear Editor, Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. 1 Shifting the detection of CRC to earlier stages via massive screening has considerably reduced mortality. 2 Metabolomics has shown great potential in the identification of noninvasive biomarkers of CRC. However, the huge number and inconsistent reports of putative markers make choosing the most appropriate biomarkers difficult. The aim of this study was to identify the metabolic markers of CRC by a multi-step strategy. We first identified and verified differential plasma metabolites of CRC by a two-stage case-control design. The tumour specificity of plasma markers was then confirmed by comparison with tumor-adjacent non-malignant paired tissue. Moreover, we conducted a systematic review of metabolomics studies of CRC to affirm the markers in multiple populations. Finally, the metabolites were quantitatively evaluated in an independent case-control population (Figure 1).A two-stage case-control study involving 170 cases and 197 controls was performed. All patients were diagnosed at the Third Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University. Controls were recruited from patients in the orthopaedic and ophthalmology departments and volunteers from Xiangfang District of Harbin City during the same period. Fasting peripheral venous blood was obtained in the morning in the hospital or medical examination centre. Metabolic profiling analysis was conducted on a ultra performance liquid chromatography (UPLC)/ Q-time-of-flight (TOF)-mass spectrometry (MS)/MS platform. Principal component analysis and orthogonal projections to latent structures discriminant analysis were performed to check the separation tendency. Student's t-test or Wilcoxon's rank-sum test with an adjusted P-value was applied to test the metabolites between cases and controls (details in Supporting Information, Section 1.1).No significant differences in age, sex or body mass index were observed between the cases and controls in This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Sophora japonica Extract Inhibits Ulcerative Colitis and Colitis-Associated Colon Cancer via Regulation of Lipid Metabolism

“…Te levels of LPCs in mice tended to return to normal after the administration of SJE. Maoqing Wang et al [42] identifed fve biomarkers of CRC, including LysoPC (14 : 0), LysoPC (16 : 0), LysoPC (18 : 0), LA, and tryptophan, through metabolomics studies. In this study, we found that LysoPC (16 : 0), LysoPC (18 : 0), LA, and tryptophan were all signifcantly regulated by SJE, providing supporting evidence for the efectiveness of SJE.…”

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