Serum metabolic profiling study of lung cancer using ultra high performance liquid chromatography/quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry

• LC/MS method was applied to analyze serum metabolic profiling of lung cancer.
• Differential metabolites revealed metabolic dysregulation of lipids in lung cancer.
• A combinational biomarker was selected and validated for lung cancer detection.

Lung cancer is currently the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. It is, therefore, important to enhance understanding and add a new auxiliary detection tool of lung cancer. In this work, serum metabolic characteristics of lung cancer were investigated with a non-targeted metabolomics method. The metabolic profiling of 23 patients with lung cancer and 23 healthy controls were analyzed using ultra high performance liquid chromatography/quadrupole time of flight mass spectrometry (UPLC/Q-TOF MS). Partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) model of the metabolic data allowed the clear separation of the lung cancer patients from the healthy controls. In total, 27 differential metabolites were identified, which were mostly related to the perturbation of lipid metabolism, including choline, free fatty acids, lysophosphatidylcholines, etc. Choline and linoleic acid were defined as one combinational biomarker using binary logistic regression, which was supported by the validation with a smaller sample-set (9 patients and 9 healthy controls). These findings show that LC/MS-based serum metabolic profiling has potential application in complementary identification of lung cancer patients, and could be a powerful tool for cancer research.