Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy based metabolomics discovers biomarkers of glioblastoma drug response

Abstract

Glioblastoma is the most common and aggressive form of brain cancer. Even with comprehensive treatment regimes, patients face an expected survival of only 15 months. Currently, methods for assessing treatment response are lacking; it is difficult to accurately determine the efficacy of a treatment. The goal of the present study was to contribute to treatment assessment by scouting for metabolic biomarkers occurring in response to exposure to chemotherapeutic agents temozolomide (TMZ) and sepantronium bromide (YM155). Untargeted metabolomics of lysate from cultured glioblastoma cells was carried out with liquid state proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy at resonance frequency 800 MHz. Spectral data were analyzed with two different multivariate statistical methods: principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares (PLS) regression. For YM155, two biomarker candidates were found: citric and lactic acid. Citric acid appeared to increase most in samples from cell lines less sensitive to YM155. Lactic acid decreased in all cell lines and was considered a more general biomarker of treatment exposure. TMZ-treated samples were not distinguishable from control samples, most likely due to too short exposure time (24 hours). Analyses with nano hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) corroborated the findings by NMR spectroscopy and statistical analyses. Both citric acid and lactic acid are biomarker candidates, but a more detailed understanding of their fluctuations in glioblastoma during treatment is needed. Nevertheless, they represent genuine candidates and should be considered for further in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) studies. In the future, the biomarkers could be monitored with MRS, allowing a more unambiguous and personalized assessment of response to treatment in individual patients.