Metabolomic heterogeneity of urogenital tract cancers analyzed by complementary chromatographic techniques coupled with mass spectrometry.

BACKGROUND: In regard to urogenital tract cancer studies, an estimated 340,650 new cases and 58,360 deaths from genital system cancer and about 141,140 new cases and 29330 deaths from urinary system were projected to occur in United States in 2012. The main drawbacks of currently available diagnostic tests constitute the low specificity, costliness and quite high invasiveness.

OBJECTIVE: The main goal of this pilot study was to determine and compare urine metabolic fingerprints in urogenital tract cancer patients and healthy controls.

METHOD: A comparative analysis of the metabolic profile of urine from 30 patients with cancer of the genitourinary system (bladder (n=10), kidney (n=10) and prostate (n=10)) and 30 healthy volunteers as a control group was provided by LC-TOF/MS and GC-QqQ/MS. The data analysis was performed by the use of U-Mann Whitney test or Student's t-test, principal component analysis (PCA) and orthogonal partial least-squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA).

RESULTS: As a result, 33, 43, and 22 compounds were identified as statistically significant in bladder, prostate and kidney cancer, respectively, comparing to healthy groups.

CONCLUSION: Diverse compounds such as purine, sugars, amino acid, nucleosides, organic acid which play a role in purine metabolism, in tricarboxylic acid cycle, in amino acid metabolism or in gut floral metabolism were identified. Only two metabolites namely glucocaffeic acid and lactic acid were found to be in common in studied three types of cancer.