Does the 1H-NMR plasma metabolome reflect the host-tumor interactions in human breast cancer?

// Vincent Richard 1, 2, 3 , Raphaël Conotte 2, 3 , David Mayne 4 and Jean-Marie Colet 2, 3 1 Department of Medical Oncology, CHU Ambroise Paré, B-7000 Mons, Belgium 2 Laboratory of Human Biology and Toxicology, Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, University of Mons, B-7000 Mons, Belgium 3 UMHAP, Bioprofiling Unit, B-7000 Mons, Belgium 4 Unité de Recherche Clinique, CHU Ambroise Paré, B-7000 Mons, Belgium Correspondence to: Vincent Richard, email: vincent.richard@hap.be Keywords: breast cancer, metabolomics, 1 H-NMR, plasma, profiling Received: November 10, 2016 Accepted: April 01, 2017 Published: May 30, 2017 ABSTRACT Breast cancer (BC) is the most common diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death in women worldwide. There is an obvious need for a better understanding of BC biology. Alterations in the serum metabolome of BC patients have been identified but their clinical significance remains elusive. We evaluated by 1 H-Nuclear Magnetic Resonance ( 1 H-NMR) spectroscopy, filtered plasma metabolome of 50 early (EBC) and 15 metastatic BC (MBC) patients. Using Principal Component Analysis, Partial Least-Squares Discriminant Analysis and Hierarchical Clustering we show that plasma levels of glucose, lactate, pyruvate, alanine, leucine, isoleucine, glutamate, glutamine, valine, lysine, glycine, threonine, tyrosine, phenylalanine, acetate, acetoacetate, β-hydroxy-butyrate, urea, creatine and creatinine are modulated across patients clusters. In particular lactate levels are inversely correlated with the tumor size in the EBC cohort (Pearson correlation r = −0.309; p = 0.044). We suggest that, in BC patients, tumor cells could induce modulation of the whole patient’s metabolism even at early stages. If confirmed in a lager study these observations could be of clinical importance.