A major obstacle of successful chemotherapy is the development of multidrug resistance (MDR) in the cancer cells, which is difficult to reverse. Metabolomic analysis, an emerging approach that has been increasingly applied in various fields, is able to reflect the unique chemical fingerprints of specific cellular processes in an organism. The assessment of such metabolite changes can be used to identify novel therapeutic biomarkers. In the present study, 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was used to analyze the extracellular metabolomic spectrum of the Tca8113 oral squamous carcinoma cell line, in which MDR was induced using the carboplatin (CBP) and pingyangmycin (PYM) chemotherapy drugs in vitro. The data were analyzed using the principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) methods. The results demonstrated that the extracellular metabolomic spectrum of metabolites such as glutamate, glycerophosphoethanol amine, α-Glucose and β-Glucose for the drug-induced Tca8113 cells was significantly different from the parental Tca8113 cell line. A number of biochemicals were also significantly different between the groups based on their NMR spectra, with drug-resistant cells presenting relatively higher levels of acetate and lower levels of lactate. In addition, a significantly higher peak was observed at δ 3.35 ppm in the spectrum of the PYM-induced Tca8113 cells. Therefore, 1H NMR-based metabolomic analysis has a high potential for monitoring the formation of MDR during clinical tumor chemotherapy in the future.
Keywords: 1H nuclear magnetic resonance; metabolomics; multidrug resistance; partial least squares discriminant analysis; principal component analysis.