Plasma Lipid Profile Reveals Plasmalogens as Potential Biomarkers for Colon Cancer Screening

In this era of precision medicine, there is an increasingly urgent need for highly sensitive tests for detecting tumors such as colon cancer (CC), a silent disease where the first symptoms may take 10-15 years to appear. Mass spectrometry-based lipidomics is an emerging tool for such clinical diagnosis. We used ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled to electrospray ionization quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry operating in high energy collision spectral acquisition mode (MS^E) mode (UPLC-QTOF-MS^E) and gas chromatography (GC) to investigate differences between the plasmatic lipidic composition of CC patients and control (CTR) subjects. Key enzymes in lipidic metabolism were investigated using immuno-based detection assays. Our partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) resulted in a suitable discrimination between CTR and CC plasma samples. Forty-two statistically significant discriminating lipids were putatively identified. Ether lipids showed a prominent presence and accordingly, a decrease in glyceronephosphate O-acyltransferase (GNPAT) enzyme activity was found. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve built for three plasmalogens of phosphatidylserine (PS), named PS(P-36:1), PS(P-38:3) and PS(P-40:5), presented an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.998, and sensitivity and specificity of 100 and 85.7% respectively. These results show significant differences in CC patients' plasma lipid composition that may be useful in discriminating them from CTR individuals with a special role for plasmalogens.