Metabolomics of lung cancer: Analytical platforms and their applications

Lung cancer is the leading type of cancer worldwide in terms of the number of new cases and is responsible for the largest number of deaths due to poor prognosis and difficult early detection. Due to its ability to detect numerous small molecular metabolites simultaneously, metabolomics has been widely used for the assessment of global metabolic changes in a living organism to discover candidate biomarkers for cancer diagnosis, investigate the development of cancer, and provide insights into the underlying pathophysiology. This review will mainly describe recent developments in lung cancer metabolomics in terms of early-stage detection, biomarker discovery and mechanism exploration by using nuclear magnetic resonance, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, and capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry in the last 10 years. The sample collection and metabolite extraction methods are also summarized.