Metabolomics identifies serum and exosomes metabolite markers of pancreatic cancer

Introduction Pancreatic cancer (PC) is one of the most aggressive malignancies, and it's difficult to diagnosis PC at an early stage, which leads to the poor prognosis of PC. Objectives To identifiy the possible prognosis or dignosis metabolite biomarkers in the serum exosome of PC patients. Methods We employed LC-DDA-MS based untargeted lipidomic analysis to search for potential candidate biomarkers in the serum exosome of PC patients. Then LC-MRM-MS based targeted lipid quantification was used to validate the trends of the candidate biomarkers in larger sample cohorts. Results About 270 lipids belonging to 20 lipid species were found significantly dysregulated between the serum exosome of PC patients and healthy controls. 61 of them were validated in larger samples size. We further analysis the correlation between these dysregulated lipids and other PC related factors, and results show that LysoPC 22:0, PC (P-14:0/22:2) and PE (16:0/18:1) are all associated with tumor stage, CA19-9, CA242 and tumor diameter. What's more, PE (16:0/18:1) is also found to be significantly correlated with the patient's overall survival. Conclusion These data reveal dysregulated lipids in serum exosome of PC patients, which have potential to be biomarkers for diagnosis, or unveil pathological relationship between exosome and PC progress.