Elemental analysis by Metallobalance provides a complementary support layer over existing blood biochemistry panel-based cancer risk assessment

Miho Kusakabe; Masahiro Sato; Yohko Nakamura; Haruo Mikami; Jason Lin; Hiroki Nagase

doi:10.7717/peerj.12247

Elemental analysis by Metallobalance provides a complementary support layer over existing blood biochemistry panel-based cancer risk assessment

PeerJ. 2021 Oct 4:9:e12247. doi: 10.7717/peerj.12247. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Miho Kusakabe^#^{1

2}, Masahiro Sato^#², Yohko Nakamura², Haruo Mikami², Jason Lin^{3

4}, Hiroki Nagase^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Graduate School of Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan.
² Cancer Prevention Center, Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute, Chiba, Japan.
³ Division of Clinical Genomics, Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute, Chiba, Japan.
⁴ Division of Cancer Genetics, Chiba Cancer Center Research Institute, Chiba, Japan.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Despite the benefit of early cancer screening, Japan has one of the lowest cancer screening rates among developed countries, possibly due to there being a lack of "a good test" that can provide sufficient levels of test sensitivity and accuracy without a large price tag. As a number of essential and trace elements have been intimately connected to the oncogenesis of cancer, Metallobalance, a recent development in elemental analysis utilizing the technique of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry has been developed and tested as a robust method for arrayed cancer risk screening. We have conducted case-control epidemiological studies in the prefecture of Chiba, in the Greater Tokyo Area, and sought to determine both Metallobalance screening's effectiveness for predicting pan-cancer outcomes, and whether the method is capable enough to replace the more conventional antigen-based testing methods. Results suggest that MB screening provides some means of classification potential among cancer and non-cancer cases, and may work well as a complementary method to traditional antigen-based tumor marker testing, even in situations where tumor markers alone cannot discernibly identify cancer from non-cancer cases.

Keywords: Cancer biology; Chemical biology; Epidemiology; Mass spectrometry; Preventative medicine.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Grant-in-Aids for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (221S0001 and 16H06277 to H.M.), Scientific Research B (JP20H03540 to H.N.), Scientific Research C (JP20K10440 to H.M.) and for Early-Career Scientists (JP17K15047 and 21K15072 to J.L.) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the SAPOIN strategic elevation of basic scientific research initiative from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan. NVIDIA Corporation provided support to Jason Lin in the form of hardware devices only. Neither the authors nor their affiliated institutions received other forms of support through the program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.