Sala Alexandra, Cameron James M, Jenkins Cerys A, Barr Hugh, Christie Loren, Conn Justin J A, Evans Thomas R Jeffry, Harris Dean A, Palmer David S, Rinaldi Christopher, Theakstone Ashton G, Baker Matthew J
Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry, University of Strathclyde, Thomas Graham Building, Glasgow G1 1XL, UK.
Dxcover Limited, Royal College Building, Glasgow G1 1XW, UK.
Cancers (Basel). 2022 Jun 21;14(13):3048. doi: 10.3390/cancers14133048.
Pancreatic cancer claims over 460,000 victims per year. The carbohydrate antigen (CA) 19-9 test is the blood test used for pancreatic cancer's detection; however, its levels can be raised in symptomatic patients with other non-malignant diseases, or with other tumors in the surrounding area. Attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy has demonstrated exceptional potential in cancer diagnostics, and its clinical implementation could represent a significant step towards early detection. This proof-of-concept study, investigating the use of ATR-FTIR spectroscopy on dried blood serum, focused on the discrimination of both cancer versus healthy control samples, and cancer versus symptomatic non-malignant control samples, as a novel liquid biopsy approach for pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Machine learning algorithms were applied, achieving results of up to 92% sensitivity and 88% specificity when discriminating between cancers ( = 100) and healthy controls ( = 100). An area under the curve (AUC) of 0.95 was obtained through receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Balanced sensitivity and specificity over 75%, with an AUC of 0.83, were achieved with cancers ( = 35) versus symptomatic controls ( = 35). Herein, we present these results as demonstration that our liquid biopsy approach could become a simple, minimally invasive, and reliable diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer detection.
胰腺癌每年导致超过46万人死亡。糖类抗原（CA）19-9检测是用于检测胰腺癌的血液检测；然而，有症状的其他非恶性疾病患者或周围区域有其他肿瘤的患者，其CA19-9水平也可能升高。衰减全反射傅里叶变换红外（ATR-FTIR）光谱在癌症诊断中已显示出卓越的潜力，其临床应用可能是朝着早期检测迈出的重要一步。这项概念验证研究调查了ATR-FTIR光谱在干血血清中的应用，重点是区分癌症样本与健康对照样本，以及癌症样本与有症状的非恶性对照样本，作为一种用于胰腺癌诊断的新型液体活检方法。应用了机器学习算法，在区分癌症患者（n = 100）和健康对照（n = 100）时，灵敏度高达92%，特异性高达88%。通过受试者工作特征（ROC）分析获得的曲线下面积（AUC）为0.95。在区分癌症患者（n = 35）和有症状的对照（n = 35）时，平衡灵敏度和特异性超过75%，AUC为0.83。在此，我们展示这些结果，以证明我们的液体活检方法可成为一种用于胰腺癌检测的简单、微创且可靠的诊断测试。
