Taurine, glutamic acid and ethylmalonic acid as important metabolites for detecting human breast cancer based on the targeted metabolomics.

BACKGROUND: This study investigated the use of serum amino acids and organic acids profiles as the novel metabolites for screening breast cancer (BC) patients.

METHODS: A total of 116 subjects as training set were divided into the following three groups: BC patients (n= 34), benign (BE) patients (n= 38) and controls (n= 44). The amino acids profiles from three groups were measured using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and organic acids profiles in three groups were studied by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The resultant study data set was subjected to multivariate statistical analysis to identify important metabolites related with BC and construct the criteria for discriminating BC patients from BE subjects or controls. A test data set derived from 60 patients (30 BC and 30 BE subjects) and 30 controls was used to validate the stability of the different metabolites.

RESULTS: The serum amino acids and organic acids profiles significantly differed between the BC patients, BE patients and the controls. Our results demonstrate that combinations of three candidate metabolites from taurine, glutamic acid and ethylmalonic acid were found to mirror tumour burden, with AUC values ranging from 0.751 to 0.834 when comparing BC patients to the controls. The areas under the curve from the taurine, glutamic acid and ethylmalonic acid in validated study were 0.901, 0.924 and 0.749, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that amino acids and organic acids profiles will be a potential screening tool for BC patients. The dysregulated metabolism of amino acids and organic acids in breast cancer might be useful for the diagnosis, therapy, prognosis and understanding the pathogenesis of breast cancer.