Ai-hua Zhang, Hui Sun, Guang-li Yan, Ying Han and Xi-jun Wang
Metabolomics is a rapidly growing field of research used in the identification and quantification of the small molecule metabolites within an organism, thereby providing insights into processes important in clinical medicine. It offers comprehensive information about thousands of low-molecular metabolites (<1500 Da) that represent a wide range of metabolism pathways. In human studies, metabolomics has been applied to define biomarkers related to prognosis or diagnosis of a disease. Pancreatic cancer is a devastating disease and has a very low 5 years-survival rate and its diagnosis is often late and imprecise due to the lack of specificity of currently used markers for pancreatic cancer. Obviously, more sensitive biomarkers for early diagnosis and treatment are urgently needed. Fortunately, metabolomics is becoming increasingly popular, and may provide clinically useful biomarkers applied toward identifying metabolic alterations in pancreatic cancer and has introduced new insights into the pathology of pancreatic cancer. By measuring the endogenous metabolites, metabolomics can be used for delineating metabolic networks and discovering metabolic markers. Studying pancreatic cancer through metabolomics could reveal new biomarkers that could be useful for its future prognosis, diagnosis and therapy. In this review we take a closer look at the metabolomics used within the field of pancreatic cancer disease diagnosis.
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