Diagnosing, Typing, and Staging of Renal Cell Carcinoma by Designer Matrix-Based Urinary Metabolic Analysis

Molecular diagnosing, typing, and staging have been considered to be the ideal alternatives of imaging-based detection methods in clinics. Designer matrix-based analytical tools, with high speed, throughout, efficiency and low/noninvasiveness, have attracted much attention recently for in vitro metabolite detection. Herein, we develop an advanced metabolic analysis tool based on highly porous metal oxides derived from available metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which elaborately inherit the morphology and porosity of MOFs and newly incorporate laser adsorption capacity of metal oxides. Through optimized conditions, direct high-quality fingerprinting spectra in 0.5 μL of urine are acquired. Using these fingerprinting spectra, we can discriminate the renal cell carcinoma (RCC) from healthy controls with higher than 0.99 of area under the curve (AUC) values (R²Y(cum) = 0.744, Q² (cum) = 0.880), as well, from patients with other tumors (R²Y(cum) = 0.748, Q²(cum) = 0.871). We also realize the typing of three RCC subtypes, including clear cell RCC, chromophobe RCC (R²Y(cum) = 0.620, Q²(cum) = 0.656), and the staging of RCC (R²Y(cum) = 0.755, Q²(cum) = 0.857). Moreover, the tumor sizes (threshold value is 3 cm) can be remarkably recognized by this advanced metabolic analysis tool (R²Y(cum) = 0.710, Q²(cum) = 0.787). Our work brings a bright prospect for designer matrix-based analytical tools in disease diagnosis, typing and staging.