Thermal Liquid Biopsy (Tlb) As a New Diagnostic Tool For Patients With Ovarian Cancer : a Pilot Study

• Main Author: torquemada, juan carlos
• Format: Web Resource
• Language: English
• Published: Morressier 01.01.2017
• DOI: 10.26226/morressier.5d43ffb4baa7e4c58300af9d

Background: Thermal Liquid Biopsy (TLB), based on Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC, calorimetric thermogram analysis of serum samples), is a new clinical approach for diagnostic assessment for patients with ovarian cancer. TLB is a highly sensitive technique traditionally used to study thermally induced macromolecular transitions. The blood (serum/plasma) TLB profile has been previously proposed as a novel approach for diagnosis and monitoring several diseases; in particular, cancer. Our main objective is to determine the ability of TLB to differentiate between healthy controls (HC) and patients with Ovarian Cancer (OC).Methods: We report in this work the application of a multiparametric analysis of TLB profiles from plasma samples collected from patients with OC before surgery from 2011 to 2018 assisted at a tertiary-level hospital. Plasma samples collected from 120 patients were analyzed and compared with histological result to determine the utility of thermograms for diagnostic and monitoring assessment in ovarian cancer. Data from 100 healthy subjects were used as reference group.Results: 120 patients diagnosed with OV (women between 29 and 83 years age) with a stage distribution of (I: 18%; II-IV: 82%), histology distribution (69% high-grade serous carcinoma, 18% clear cell carcinoma, 7% endometrioid carcinoma, 3% mucinous carcinoma and 3% others) compared to 100 HC with a homogeneous distribution from a blood bank were included in our study. The parameters included in our multiparametric method showed statistical differences between HC and OC. After developing ROC curves, AUC higher than 0.8 were observed for these parameters, exceeding 0.85 in some of them. The Youdenu2019s index was calculated for all of them, finding sensitivity and specificity values higher than 75.0-90.0% (for the best parameter, both indexes were higher than 85.0%).Conclusions: Results suggest that TLB exhibits high specificity and sensitivity values when comparing TLD data to clinical assessment/diagnostic imaging detecting malignancy for ovarian pathology.General Significance: TLB offers advantages over current diagnostic techniques (IOTA Score by Ultrasound/CT imaging), providing a minimally-invasive, low-risk, low-cost clinical test, and allowing closer and personalized patient monitoring for diagnostic assessment of ovarian pathology and facilitating the decision-making process.