Using Chemometrics and Ambient Mass Spectrometry for Oncometabolomics Diagnostics Applications

CHRISTINA JONES; TRAN QUOC LONG; MARIA EUGENIA MONGE; ALEX GRAY; JOHN MCDONALD; FACUNDO M. FERNANDEZ

Encuentro; SERMACS 2012 The Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society; 2012

American Chemical Society

Metabolomes, the ?mirror on the wall? for complex proteomes and transcriptomes show strong promise for generating new hypothesis regarding the early stages of cancer development, and for revealing biomarkers providing multivariate diagnostic indexes. Mass spectrometry-based metabolomic technologies have a demonstrated potential for early disease detection in clinical settings (e.g. newborn screening), provided the specific assays employed have the sample throughput, robustness and reproducibility necessary to handle numerous clinical samples reproducibly. In this talk, I will discuss recent results from our team of collaborators involving the use of metabolomic workflows involving mass spectrometric measurements coupled to support vector machine learning with the aim of identifying panels of metabolic features that help differentiate patients with ovarian cancer from those with benign ovarian conditions. We will also introduce new ?ambient? MS methods that show promise for oncometabolomic applications, and discuss the need for new chemometric approaches to explore the datasets generated.