Serum metabolites as early detection markers of non-muscle invasive bladder cancer in Chinese patients

Yi Zhao; Wei Sun; Zhigang Ji; Xiaoyan Liu; Yi Qiao

doi:10.3389/fonc.2023.1061083

Serum metabolites as early detection markers of non-muscle invasive bladder cancer in Chinese patients

Front Oncol. 2023 Mar 3:13:1061083. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2023.1061083. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Yi Zhao¹, Wei Sun², Zhigang Ji¹, Xiaoyan Liu², Yi Qiao¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Urology, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China.
² School of Basic Medicine, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Peking Union Medical College, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Background: Biomarkers of different stages and grades of bladder cancer (BC) are important in clinical work. The objective of our study was to investigate new biomarkers of early-stage BC with liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) using serum samples.

Methods: A total of 215 cases were included in our study, including 109 healthy adults as the control group and 106 non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) patients as the NMIBC group. Serum samples were collected from BC patients in the early stage, called NMIBC, and healthy people before surgery. We used LC-HRMS to distinguish the NMIBC group from the control group and the low-grade NMIBC group from the control group.

Results: An apparent difference between the NMIBC group and the control group was visualized by unsupervised principal component analysis (PCA). Metabolite panels for 16-hydroxy-10-oxohexadecanoic acid, PGF2a ethanolamide, sulfoglycolithocholate, and threoninyl-alanine were used to distinguish the two groups. The area under the curve (AUC) of the panels was 0.985, and the sensitivity and specificity were 98.63% and 98.59%, respectively. To distinguish the low-grade NMIBC group from the control group, serum metabolic profiling differences between the low-grade NMIBC group and control group samples were also analyzed. Metabolite panels of L-octanoylcarnitine, PGF2a ethanolamide, and threoninyl-alanine showed good discrimination performance. The AUC of the panels was 0.999, and the sensitivity and specificity were 97.8% and 100%, respectively.

Conclusion: Metabolomics analysis of serum samples can distinguish the NMIBC group from the control group, particularly the early-stage low-grade NMIBC group.

Keywords: LC-HRMS; NMIBC; biomarkers; bladder cancer; serum metabolites.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 82170524 and 31901039), the Beijing Medical Research (No. 2018-7), the CAMS Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences (2021-1-I2 M-016), and the Biologic Medicine Information Center of China, National Scientific Data Sharing Platform for Population and Health.