Human sweat metabolomics for lung cancer screening

Abstract

Sweat is one of the less employed biofluids for discovery of markers in spite of its increased application in medicine for detection of drugs or for diagnostic of cystic fibrosis. In this research, human sweat was used as clinical sample to develop a screening tool for lung cancer, which is the carcinogenic disease with the highest mortality rate owing to the advanced stage at which it is usually detected. In this context, a method based on the metabolite analysis of sweat to discriminate between patients with lung cancer versus smokers as control individuals is proposed. The capability of the metabolites identified in sweat to discriminate between both groups of individuals was studied and, among them, a trisaccharide phosphate presented the best independent performance in terms of the specificity/sensitivity pair (80 and 72.7%, respectively). Additionally, two panels of metabolites were configured using the PanelomiX tool as an attempt to reduce false negatives (at least 80% specificity) and false positives (at least 80% sensitivity). The first panel (80% specificity and 69% sensitivity) was composed by suberic acid, a tetrahexose, and a trihexose, while the second panel (69% specificity and 80% sensitivity) included nonanedioic acid, a trihexose, and the monoglyceride MG(22:2). Thus, the combination of the five metabolites led to a single panel providing 80% specificity and 79% sensitivity, reducing the false positive and negative rates to almost 20%. The method was validated by estimation of within-day and between-days variability of the quantitative analysis of the five metabolites

Sweat lipid mediator profiling: a noninvasive approach for cutaneous research

“…More recent MS-based approaches confirmed the presence of amino acid-and lipid-derived molecules, while additionally showing the presence of carbohydrates and organic acids in sweat (10,11). MS-based metabolomics of sweat was also used to develop a screening tool for lung cancer (12).…”

Noninvasive Metabolic Profiling for Painless Diagnosis of Human Diseases and Disorders

“…The most commonly used biomatrices that are collected and used for this purpose are urine, exhaled breath, saliva and fecal extract [10]. Apart from these popular biomatrices, there exist some unconventional biomatrices such as sweat [109] and hair [107] that can be used for noninvasive diagnostics. The application of metabolic profiling for noninvasive diagnostics can be observed in different forms of cancer, metabolic disorders like diabetes, in born errors of metabolism, infectious diseases, neurodegenerative disorders rheumatic diseases and pulmonary diseases.…”

“…Recently, metabolic profiling of sweat has been carried out for noninvasive diagnosis of lung cancer. This resulted in the identification of significant marker metabolites such as a trisaccharide phosphate, suberic acid, a tetrahexose, a trihexose, nonanedioic acid and monoglyceride (22:2) [109]. …”

Metabolomics in the Context of Forensic Omics Biomarkers

“…One other classification of biomarkers is based on the number of compounds forming part of the given biomarker. This classification is characteristic of metabolomics biomarkers, giving place to single metabolite biomarkers and panel metabolite biomarkers [10,11].…”

“…Examples should be metabolomics biomarkers of vaginal exposure to semen, which overcome the shortcomings of present biomarkers based on other omics such as those of seminal plasma, among which prostatespecific antigen (PSA) is the best characterized; and biomarkers of spermatozoa and other cells present in semen; none of which are ideal biomarkers [55][56][57]. The useful and interesting substitution of PSA by a metabolites panel as that recently reported for prostate cancer biomarkers [11] could be an example for promoting forensic research in this area.…”