GC-MS-based untargeted metabolomics of plasma and urine to evaluate metabolic changes in prostate cancer

Abstract

Prostate cancer (CaP) is a common cancer in men. Its late detection and inefficient diagnosis are a challenge for researchers who are currently searching for new cancer-related indicators that would facilitate better detectability of CaP and explain its pathogenesis. In the present preliminary study, endogenous volatile metabolites were detected in plasma and urine samples by using the metabolic fingerprinting approach. The analyses were performed using the GC-QqQ/MS technique in the scan mode. The detected and putatively identified metabolites were statistically analyzed using advanced univariate and multivariate statistical methods. Eleven urinary and three plasma metabolites were selected as statistically significant in patients with CaP as compared to those in healthy controls. Supervised methods such as logistic regression and quadratic support vector machine were applied to obtain the classification models. The accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of the models were above 83%, 85%, and 81%, respectively. The putatively identified metabolites were associated with biochemical pathways such as tricarboxylic acid cycle, glycolysis, carbohydrate conversion, and steroidal lipid metabolism that are mainly involved in energy production for cell growth and proliferation.

Worm-Based Diagnosis Combining Microfluidics toward Early Cancer Screening

“…However, the specific molecules responsible for this behavior remain unidentified. Previous studies have shown varying levels of certain molecules in cancerous urine compared to healthy controls [99][100][101][102][103]. For instance, in ovarian cancer, metabolites such as serine, glutamate, tyrosine, arachidonic acid, succinic acid, and acrylic acid are upregulated, while 2-phosphoenolpyruvate, benzoic acid, phenylacetic acid, nervonic acid, stearic acid, and creatinine are downregulated [104,105].…”

Untargeted LC-HRMS Based-Plasma Metabolomics Reveals 3-O-Methyldopa as a New Biomarker of Poor Prognosis in High-Risk Neuroblastoma

“…In particular, 3-Hydroxyisobutyric acid and L-cystathionine were found to be more expressed in metastatic patients at diagnosis when compared to those after induction chemotherapy. 3-Hydroxyisobutyric acid is an intermediate in the metabolism of valine that has been found in elevated amounts in the urine of patients with various tumors (49,50). Cystathionine is an intermediate in the synthesis of cysteine produced by the trans-sulfuration pathway which converts homocysteine into cystathionine (51).…”

Untargeted stable isotope-resolved metabolomics to assess the effect of PI3Kβ inhibition on metabolic pathway activities in a PTEN null breast cancer cell line

“…Untargeted metabolomic profiling has become a valuable tool for the identification of potential metabolic biomarkers in cancer (Struck-Lewicka et al, 2020;Kowalczyk et al, 2021) or the assessment of the response to anti-tumor therapy (Han et al, 2021;Ruan et al, 2022). In order to investigate dynamic pathway alterations in metabolic networks, untargeted stable isotope resolved metabolomics (SIRM) can be applied as a complementary tool (Huang et al, 2014) to evaluate the cellular fate of precursor metabolites and thereby enabling deeper insight into dysregulation of cancer metabolism and individual drug response phenotypes.…”