Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Oral and Craniofacial Sciences, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Pharmacology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 3 Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
  • 4 Industrial Biotechnology Research Centre (IBRC), SIRIM Berhad, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 5 Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, UCSI University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 6 Department of Restorative Dentistry, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 7 Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 8 Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia
PeerJ, 2020;8:e9304.
PMID: 32547888 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.9304

Abstract

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) represents a significant world health problem, with approximately 600,000 new cases being diagnosed annually. The prognosis for patients with HNSCC is poor and, therefore, the identification of biomarkers for screening, diagnosis and prognostication would be clinically beneficial. A limited number of studies have used lipidomics to profile lipid species in the plasma of cancer patients. However, the profile and levels of lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) species have not been examined in HNSCC. In this study, a targeted lipidomics approach using liquid chromatography triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (LCMS/MS) was used to analyse the concentration of LPA (16:0 LPA, 18:0 LPA, 18:1 LPA, 18:2 LPA and 20:4 LPA) in the plasma of patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), together with healthy controls. The levels of three LPA species (18:1 LPA, 18:2 LPA and 20:4 LPA) were significantly lower in the plasma of OSCC patients, whilst the concentrations of all five LPA species tested were significantly lower in plasma from NPC patients. Furthermore, the order of abundance of LPA species in plasma was different between the control and cancer groups, with 16:0 LPA, 18:0 LPA levels being more abundant in OSCC and NPC patients. Medium to strong correlations were observed using all pairs of LPA species and a clear separation of the normal and tumour groups was observed using PCA analysis. In summary, the results of this study showed that the levels of several LPA species in the plasma of patients with OSCC and NPC were lower than those from healthy individuals. Understanding these variations may provide novel insights into the role of LPA in these cancers.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.