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Donny Doan

Laurie Oberg

English

22 January 2018

How Are Metabolic Biomarkers Used For Early Detection Of Cancer?

Growing up without television, I spent almost all of my free time on YouTube when it

became popular. I was around eight years old at the time and didn’t really discover things that

were interesting to me yet, so I just clicked on videos with cool thumbnails or with large amounts

of views. Because of this, I ended up watching a lot of videos by “Fred Figglehorn” and random

documentaries. I only watched Fred because he had a lot of views and documentaries because of

the cool thumbnails, and somehow, I was more interested in the documentaries despite barely

having a grasp on the information the documentaries threw at me. One of the documentaries

stated that dogs could smell much better than we could, and could even smell diseases such as

cancer, which was one of the few concepts I could understand at the time, and I had been

interested by how dogs could smell cancer ever since. I did a little bit of research this year and

found that the smells that dogs were picking up were mainly metabolic biomarkers, specifically

volatile organic compounds, which are compounds that evaporate easily under normal

conditions, such as perfume, which is sprayed as a liquid that quickly evaporates into the air.

With this research project, I plan to figure out how these biomarkers work and how they

are used to determine the presence of diseases, specifically cancer. I think searching for research

articles from Google Scholars would be my best bet. Unfortunately, many research papers found

on Google Scholars were locked and I had to pay a rather high amount of money to view the

papers. On some sites, I even had to message one of the administrators to ask for pricing of the
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papers for me in particular, so the sites could charge differently per person, which was absurd.

Of course, I’m rather poor, so I found a way to access the articles without having to pay for the

papers or messaging some admin for the pricing of the papers. I doubt what I did was legal, but

whatever, I’m broke, and education should be cheap and free anyway.

From my possibly illegal research, I’ve found that metabolic biomarkers are compounds

that are excreted by cells as waste products that can be used to determine the presence of

disorders and diseases. These biomarkers that are excreted are varied by many different possible

circumstances such as weather (Acevado, Cristian A, et al) (This one was legal by the way) and

the changes in cell function, which is changed by the presence of a disease or disorder.

Out of all the metabolic biomarkers, I’ve noted that dogs were primarily smelling the

volatile substances since the substance had to be in the air to travel to the nasal cavity where the

olfactory receptor cells, the cells that catch the volatile compounds as smells, reside. Because of

this, only volatile compounds that were determined to be biomarkers of a specific disease could

be used by dogs as the determining smell of that specific disease.

At this point, I’ve found how dogs smell cancer but I hadn’t answered my question yet,

so after a little bit more legally questionable research, I had found that scientists have started

using volatile compounds, which are the ones dogs can smell, as biomarkers for lung cancer and

have even developed a breath test for the detection of the presence of these compounds. This

means the detection of lung cancer could be replicated with a simple breath test instead of a

biopsy and a computerized tomography scan (CT scan). Further testing would have to be done to

determine the viability of the breath test of course (Phillips, Michael, et al, 1999).

I have also found that the use of volatile compounds as biomarkers is being used for early

detection of breast cancer. The research conducted on the early detection of breast cancer was
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done by some of the researchers who created the breath test for lung cancer. They also created a

breath test for breast cancer, similar to the one used for lung cancer. Like the lung cancer breath

test, the breast cancer breath test was less invasive as compared to the current diagnosis

technique, biopsy (Phillips, Michael, et al, 2006).

Unfortunately, these breath tests have not been verified for diagnostic use yet, and will

require additional testing before they are verified for diagnostic use.

Another thing I learned is that most if not all research on volatile compounds as

biomarkers use gas chromatography and mass spectrometry for identification of the volatile

compounds collected. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any info on how the breath tests were made,

which was only expected since if they released info on how the breath tests were made, someone

else could steal their idea and take the credit.

Research on collection of volatile compounds from skin has also been conducted, where

the use of solid-phase microextraction was used to collect the volatile compounds from skin,

which were run through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry for analysis (Gallagher, M.,

et al. 2008). This study was not used for detection of cancer or biomarkers for any specific

diseases or disorders, but I found the article interesting because of the methods used for

collection and analysis of the volatile compounds.

From this research, I have learned that volatile biomarkers are used for early detection of

cancer because they are the compounds that signal the possible presence of diseases such as

cancer. Also, the use of volatile compounds for the detection of cancer is a lot cheaper,

accessible, and easily conducted as compared to current methods which is primarily based on

biopsies which are invasive, and expensive.

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Abaffy, T., et al. “Comparative analysis of volatile metabolomics signals from melanoma and

benign skin: a pilot study.” Metabolomics, Springer US, 2013,

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3769583/.

Acevado, Cristian A, et al. “Volatile Organic Compounds Produced by Human Skin Cells.”

Biological Research, Sociedad de Biología de Chile,

scielo.conicyt.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0716-

97602007000400009&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en.

Gallagher, M., et al. “Analyses of volatile organic compounds from human skin.” The British

journal of dermatology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Sept. 2008,

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2574753/.

Phillips, Michael, et al. “Volatile organic compounds in breath as markers of lung cancer: a

cross-Sectional study.” The Lancet, Elsevier, 7 July 1999,

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673698075527.

Phillips, Michael, et al. “Prediction of breast cancer using volatile biomarkers in the breath.”

SpringerLink, Springer US, 24 Feb. 2006, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10549-006-

9176-1.