Two lipids based on lipidomics as novel biomarkers for early detection of squamous cell lung cancer.
11114 Background: Lipids play roles in membrane structure, energy storage, and signal transduction as well as lung cancer. Lipidomics, a new technology aims to measure all the lipids in a cell, has not been applied to diagnostic test development for a variety of cancer types. Here, we adopt lipidomics as a means to identify plasma lipid markers for the early detection of lung cancer and complement CT-based methods for lung cancer screening. Methods: Using mass spectrometry, we profiled 390 individual lipids in a training discovery cohort comprised of cohorts that were either at “high-risk” for lung cancer (n=22) and squamous cell carcinoma at early stages (n=22). Cases had a minimum of two years clinical follow-up and were matched in terms of race, sex, age and smoking status. Gain ratio feature selection and local weighted classification model were employed to find the best training classifier, which was further validated against an additional cohort, including high-risk individuals (n= 20) and squamous cell carcinoma patients (n=17). Results: In the training discovery stage, we found 20 distinct lipids that were significantly distributed between high-risk and cases of squamous cell carcinoma. We further defined a two lipid marker panel had a training accuracy at 95.5% sensitivity, 90.9% specificity and 95.2% AUC (Area under ROC curve). The validation accuracy against the additional cohort is 100.0% sensitivity, 90.0% specificity and 99.0% AUC (Table). The power for sample size we used in both discovery training and validation stages were over 90%. Conclusions: Using lipidomics we identified two lipid markers capable of discerning cases of squamous cell carcinoma from individuals at high risk for lung cancer, with a high sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. The markers maybe further developed as a quick, safe blood test for early diagnosis of squamous cell lung cancer and reduce unnecessary follow-up imaging or invasive procedures. [Table: see text]