In patients with intestinal cancer it is useful to determine the metabolic fingerprint of tumors

It’s possible to assess how advanced a bowel cancer is by looking at its metabolic fingerprint, according to new research.

Bowel cancer is the third most common type of cancer worldwide, with more than 1 million new cases diagnosed each year. Determining exactly what stage a tumor has reached is critical in determining which treatments to offer.

When determining the metabolic fingerprint, a sample of blood, urine or tissue is analyzed for the concentrations of very different metabolites, which are the products of chemical reactions in the body’s cells. This mixture of metabolites is altered as the cancer develops and grows. The researchers who collaborated on the new study, from Imperial College London, point out that doctors could use metabolic fingerprinting in conjunction with available imaging techniques to make the most accurate analysis of a tumor possible. This research is published in the Annals of Surgery. Doctors currently use a combination of CT, MRI, and ultrasound to assess how advanced a tumor is, but because these tests rely on visual estimates of a tumor’s size and location, they aren’t always as sensitive or specific. Previous studies have shown that these techniques regularly indicate that a tumor is more or less advanced than it really is.

Dr Reza Mirnezami, lead author of the study from Imperial College London’s Department of Surgery and Cancer, said: ‘Investigating the stage of a tumor is critical in planning a patient’s treatment. Increasingly, before surgically resecting a tumour, we give treatments to try to reduce its mass, but the kinds of treatments we offer depend on our assessment of how advanced the tumor is. The more precise we can be, the better the patient’s chances of survival.
“Our research indicates that using metabolic fingerprinting techniques in addition to imaging assessment may give us the clearest possible picture of how the cancer is progressing.”

For the new study, researchers analyzed the metabolic fingerprint of 44 intestinal tumor tissue samples, provided by patients cared for at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, using high-resolution magic-angle rotational magnetic resonance spectroscopy (HR-MAS). NMR). His results in determining the stage the cancer had reached were as accurate as existing radiological methods.

Lord Ara Darzi, Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College London, and the study’s lead author, said: “We know that even with the impressive scanning technology we have available so far, it is not always possible to correctly verify the local stage of a disease. cancer. Our study seems to indicate that if used in conjunction with medical imaging, metabolic fingerprinting could allow us to obtain more accurate information. This could give us more certainty about the correct treatment to administer to patients, and avoiding some of them an invasive treatment when they do not need it”.

The research also indicates that tumors take on unique metabolic properties as they progress further, opening new avenues for treatment. The researchers hope that it will ultimately be possible to identify different metabolic targets when the cancer is at different stages, in order to disable or slow down the tumor. Professor Jeremy Nicholson, Head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London and corresponding author of the study, said: “This study represents one part of our program to develop advanced technology to improve patient tolerability in the surgical setting and shows the enormous potential of using metabolic models to stratify patients and optimize treatment.”