Serum lipid profiling analysis and potential marker discovery for ovarian cancer based on liquid chromatography–Mass spectrometry

Abstract

Low early diagnosis rate and unclear pathogenesis are the primary reasons for the high mortality of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). Lipidomics is a powerful tool for marker discovery and mechanism explanation. Hence, a ultra high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry based non-targeted lipidomics analysis was performed to acquire lipid profiling of 153 serum samples including healthy control (HC, n = 50), benign ovarian tumor (BOT, n = 41), and EOC (n = 62) to reveal lipid disturbance, then differential lipids were verified in another sample set including 187 sera. Significant lipid disturbance occurred in BOT and EOC, fatty acid, lyso-phosphatidylcholine, and lyso-phosphatidylethanolamine were observed to be increased in BOT and EOC subjects, while phosphatidylcoline, ether phosphatidylcoline (PC-O), ether phosphatidylethanolamine (PE-O), and sphingomyelin significantly decreased. Compared with BOT, PC-Os and PE-Os presented a greater reduction in EOC, and serum ceramide increased only in EOC. Moreover, potential markers consisting of 4 lipids were defined and validated for EOC diagnosis. High areas under the curve (0.854∼0.865 and 0.903∼0.923 for distinguishing EOC and early EOC from non-cancer, respectively) as well as good specificity and sensitivity were obtained. This study not only revealed the characteristics of lipid metabolism in EOC, but also provided a potential marker pattern for aiding EOC diagnosis.