Metabolomics in pancreatic cancer biomarkers research

Pancreatic cancer is one of the worst prognoses of all malignancies. More than 40,000 deaths a year from this disease are observed in European Union alone. The only possibly curative treatment of pancreatic cancer is surgery, yet only 15-20% of patients have operable disease and even patients, which go through surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy, survival is less than 30%. The sensitive and specific biomarkers which could be used for the advance of early diagnostics are needed and constantly researched. Metabolomics is a technology which analyzes the concentrations of low-molecular-weight metabolites (the metabolome) has lately effectively developed due to the improvements in analytical technology. Metabolome analysis can be a one of the useful approaches for the biomarker discovery and disease diagnosis. Here we discuss recent discoveries in the field of pancreatic cancer metabolomics as well as the most promising biomarkers for diagnostics, prognosis and prediction.