Infrared molecular fingerprinting of blood-based liquid biopsies for the detection of cancer
Marinus Huber, Kosmas V. Kepesidis, Liudmila Voronina, Frank Fleischmann, Ernst E. Fill, Jacqueline Hermann, Ina Koch, Katrin Milger, Thomas Kolben, Gerald Bastian Schulz, Friedrich Jokisch, Jürgen Behr, Nadia Harbeck, Maximilian F. Reiser, Christian G. Stief, Ferenc Krausz, Mihaela Žigman
Abstract
Recent omics analyses of human biofluids provide opportunities to probe selected species of biomolecules for disease diagnostics. Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy investigates the full repertoire of molecular species within a sample at once. Here, we present a multi-institutional study in which we analysed infrared fingerprints of plasma and serum samples from 1639 individuals with different solid tumours and carefully matched symptomatic and non-symptomatic reference individuals. Focusing on breast, bladder, prostate, and lung cancer, we find that infrared molecular fingerprinting is capable of detecting cancer: training a support vector machine algorithm allowed us to obtain binary classification performance in the range of 0.78-0.89 (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC]), with a clear correlation between AUC and tumour load. Intriguingly, we find that the spectral signatures differ between different cancer types. This study lays the foundation for high-throughput onco-IR-phenotyping of four common cancers, providing a cost-effective, complementary analytical tool for disease recognition.