Finding biomarkers for early lung cancer diagnosis

20-Aug-2015 - USA

lung cancer patients are often diagnosed only when their disease is already at an advanced stage and hard to treat. Researchers at the West Coast metabolomics Center at UC Davis are trying to change that, by identifying biomarkers that could be the basis of early tests for lung cancer.

Lung cancer can be diagnosed early with regular low-dose CT (computed tomography) scans of people at risk. But these tests are very expensive, and also involve exposing patients to X-ray radiation. Instead, Oliver Fiehn, director of the metabolomics center and a professor of molecular and cellular biology at UC Davis, project scientist William Wikoff and colleagues set out to look for biomarkers of developing lung cancer in blood from patients.

Fiehn's lab specializes in "metabolomics," an approach that involves analyzing all the biochemical products of metabolism in cells and tissues at the same time. Like other "-omics" approaches, it's made possible by new technology and computing power.

Applying metabolomics, Wikoff and Fiehn found that one molecule, diacetylspermine, was almost doubled in serum collected from patients up to six months before they were diagnosed with lung cancer, compared to healthy controls.

They then combined diacetylspermine with another previously identified biomarker, a protein called pro-surfactant protein B (pro-SFTPB), and tested for both markers in another set of sera collected from CARET patients months before they developed lung cancer.

"Individually, the markers were about 70 percent predictive but in combination, that rose to 80 percent," Fiehn said. In other words, eight out of ten people with early-stage cancer would be correctly identified by the combined test.

If the double biomarker were in use as a clinical test, those patients could then be referred for a low-dose CT scan to confirm the presence of cancer.

Original publication

William R. Wikoff, Samir Hanash, Brian DeFelice, Suzanne Miyamoto, Matt Barnett, Yang Zhao, Gary Goodman, Ziding Feng, David Gandara, Oliver Fiehn and Ayumu Taguchi; "Diacetylspermine Is a Novel Prediagnostic Serum Biomarker for Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer and Has Additive Performance With Pro-Surfactant Protein B"; Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2015

https://www.analytica-world.com/en/news/154174/finding-biomarkers-for-early-lung-cancer-diagnosis.html