Electric-Field Molecular Fingerprinting to Probe Cancer

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Molecular Spectroscopy
• Clinical Diagnostics

Background:

• Human biofluids offer insights into physiological states.
• Advanced molecular profiling technologies can improve clinical diagnostics.
• Laser-based electric-field molecular fingerprinting is an emerging technique.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the potential of electric-field molecular fingerprinting for in vitro diagnostics.
• To detect cancer-specific infrared signatures in blood plasma.
• To evaluate the robustness of this technology in real-world conditions.

Main Methods:

• A proof-of-concept clinical study with 2533 participants.
• Spectroscopic profiling of bulk venous blood plasma using laser-based electric-field molecular fingerprinting.
• Machine learning algorithms applied to detect infrared signatures.

Main Results:

• Detected infrared signatures specific to therapy-naïve cancer states (lung, prostate, breast, bladder).
• Achieved a cross-validation ROC AUC of 0.88 for lung cancer and 0.68-0.69 for others.
• Demonstrated a lung cancer detection ROC AUC of 0.81 on an independent test set.

Conclusions:

• Electric-field molecular fingerprinting is a robust technological framework.
• The technique is broadly applicable to disease phenotyping.
• This method holds potential for enhancing in vitro diagnostics and cancer detection.