Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry for the Metabolomic Analysis of Urine in Colorectal Cancer

We report here the results of a pilot study in which ultra-high performance liquid chromatography/time-of-flight–mass spectrometry (UPLC/TOF–MS) and multivariate statistical analysis (supervised partial least squares discriminant analysis, PLS-DA) were applied for urinary metabolite profiling and data interpretation. The results of the PLS-DA indicated that the metabolic pattern as a whole was significantly different between the groups of preoperative colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, postoperative CRC patients, and healthy volunteers, respectively. The preoperative group of patients showed significantly increased levels of low-molecular weight compounds (LMC) MW 283 and MW 234 in comparison to the group of healthy volunteers group. After the operation, the levels of these two LMC significantly decreased. These preliminary results suggest that the UPLC–MS-based method coupled with pattern recognition will likely lead to procedures with the potential to be clinically applicable for the diagnosis of CRC and, consequently, to an improvement in patient prognosis.