A metabolomics approach for predicting the response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in cervical cancer patients

Abstract

Cervical cancer is a clinical and pathological heterogeneity disease, which requires different types of treatments and leads to a variety of outcomes. In clinical practice, only some patients benefit from chemotherapy treatment. Identifying patients who will be responsive to chemotherapy could increase their survival time, which has important implications in personalized treatment and outcomes, while identifying non-responders may reduce the likelihood for these patients to receive ineffective treatment and thereby enable them to receive other potentially effective treatments. Plasma metabolite profiling was performed in this study to identify the potential biomarkers that could predict the response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) for cervical cancer patients. The metabolic profiles of plasma from 38 cervical cancer patients with a complete, partial and non-response to NACT were studied using a combination of liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC/MS) and multivariate analysis methods. L-Valine and L-tryptophan were finally identified and verified as the potential biomarkers. A prediction model constructed with L-valine and L-tryptophan correctly identified approximately 80% of patients who were non-response to chemotherapy and 87% of patients who were had a pathologically complete response to chemotherapy. The model has an excellent discriminant performance with an AUC of 0.9407. These results show promise for larger studies that could produce more personalized treatment protocols for cervical cancer patients.

UPLC-QTOF MS-Based Serum Metabolomic Profiling Analysis Reveals the Molecular Perturbations Underlying Uremic Pruritus

“…As an alternative approach for biomarker discovery, metabolomics (or metabolite profiling) enables the identification of small-molecule metabolites in biofluids and tissues that are sensitive to altered pathology [ 7 ]. Over the past several years, ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS), which is an information-rich analytical technique, has become an advanced and useful tool [ 8 ]. Compared to other biomarker approaches, metabolomics might provide more insight into pathogenesis [ 9 ].…”

Fortune telling: metabolic markers of plant performance

“…Urine metabolic profiling led to the identification of metabolic markers of symptomatic gout (Liu et al 2012 ) and preeclampsia (Austdal et al 2015 ) and blood profiling has been used to estimate the risk of bacteremic sepsis in emergency rescue situations (Kauppi et al 2016 ). Another promising application of metabolite analysis in medical science is the prediction of cancer risk (Lee et al 2014 ; McDunn et al 2013 ; Truong et al 2013 ) or the evaluation of the putative effect of cancer treatments (Hou et al 2014 ; Jiang et al 2014 ; Wei et al 2013 ).…”

Blood Metabolites Associate with Prognosis in Endometrial Cancer

“…As the most common female cancer, breast cancer has been extensively studied [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], also providing untapped opportunities in metabolomics studies in association with gynecological cancers. Moreover, biomarkers have been proposed for application in cervical and ovarian cancers based on metabolomics [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”