SERUM metabolomics of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and acute myeloid leukaemia for probing biomarker molecules

Acute leukaemia (AL) is a critical neoplasm of white blood cells. Diagnosing AL requires bone marrow puncture procedure, which many patients do not consent to for it is invasive. Hence sensitive and specific early diagnostic biomarkers are essential for non-invasive diagnosis, new therapeutics and improving the disease prognosis. To differentiate the metabolic alterations associated with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) and acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), we investigated serum of ALL and AML patients in comparison with two controls using gas chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry and multivariate statistical analysis. Twenty seven out of 1425 metabolites were found differentiative among ALL, AML, aplastic anaemia (APA) patients and healthy control using p-value ≤ 0.001. ALL is the most dissimilar group from other three groups as in hierarchical clustering showed 72.1% dissimilarity. Model generation using PLSDA gave an overall accuracy of 91.9%. This study helps in metabolic fingerprinting of control and disease serum at high significance levels and could be used for early diagnosing of AL. Based on pathways analysis, fatty acid metabolism is deregulated in patients with AL and may represent an underlying metabolic pathway associated with disease progression. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.