Infrared molecular fingerprinting – a new in vitro diagnostic platform technology for cancer detection in blood-based liquid biopsies
The levels, chemical modifications, and relative ratios of biomolecules circulating in systemic bioliquids, like blood plasma, are indicators of various physiological and pathological states. Capitalizing on broadband optics, ultrafast laser sources, and precision femtosecond-attosecond field-resolving technologies, we recently developed electric-field molecular fingerprinting (EMF) to detect changes in molecular composition of bioliquids, establishing EMF as a new in vitro diagnostic analytical technique to uncover characteristic molecular traces of diseases in blood samples. EMF, as advanced infrared spectroscopy, has the inherent capacity to sensitively and robustly probe across different types of chemical bonds and molecular classes within one measurement, providing deep cross-molecular description of physiological states. Here, we present data from our multi-centric multi-cancer study in which we analyzed infrared molecular fingerprints of plasma and serum from several thousands of individuals, involving cancer patients with different solid tumors and matched reference individuals. Focusing on four common cancers - breast, bladder, prostate, and lung cancer - we find that infrared molecular fingerprinting is capable of detecting therapy-naïve malignant conditions. Employing machine learning data analytics, we obtain binary classification performances in the range of 0.78–0.89 (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC]), and additionally demonstrate correlation between AUC and tumor load. Intriguingly, we find that the spectral signatures differ between different cancer types, thus allowing to distinguish between different cancers in a single measurement. Our studies lay the foundation for using EMF in health monitoring, in particular for onco-infrared-fingerprinting, providing a novel high-throughput, cost-effective technology platform that can be used as a complementary analytical tool for cancer detection and screening.