The development of effective screening methods for early cancer detection is one of the foremost challenges facing modern cancer research. Urinary metabolomics has recently emerged as a potentially transformative approach to cancer biomarker discovery owing to its noninvasive sampling characteristics and robust analytical feasibility. As an extension of conventional metabolomics, urinary metabolomics has benefitted from recent technological developments in nuclear magnetic resonance, mass spectrometry, gas and liquid chromatography, and capillary electrophoresis that have improved urine metabolome coverage and analytical reproducibility. Meanwhile, extensive metabolic profiling in urine has revealed a significant number of altered metabolic pathways and putative biomarkers, including pteridines, modified nucleosides, and acylcarnitines, that have been associated with cancer development and progression. In this talk, we will provide an overview of new developments in urinary metabolomics by covering the most promising aspects of hyphenated techniques in untargeted and targeted metabolomics, followed by a meta-analysis of recent untargeted studies from which we have compiled an extensive list of putative biomarkers that have been revealed by urinary metabolomics. Finally, we will discuss the current limitations and emerging challenges in the field, such as methods to adjust urinary metabolites to urine concentration-dilution and biological variation, and offer future perspectives for how the field is anticipated to change over the next several years.

Current trends in cancer biomarker discovery using urinary metabolomics: Achievements and new challenges

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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