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

• Main Authors: Miho Kusakabe, Masahiro Sato, Yohko Nakamura, Haruo Mikami, Jason Lin, Hiroki Nagase
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: PeerJ Inc. 2021-10-01
• Series: PeerJ
• Subjects: Cancer biology; Chemical biology; Epidemiology; Mass spectrometry; Preventative medicine
• Online Access: https://peerj.com/articles/12247.pdf

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.