Profiling of Small Volatiles for Diseases Fingerprinting

A range of detected small (molecular weights less than approximately 500 Daltons) volatile molecules or organic compounds (VOC) can be “fingerprinted” using a chemical analysis by GC-MS to generate data sets related to a disease or health of an individual. Our effort is directed towards identifying potential volatile molecules that can be correlated to pancreatic adenocarcinomas

Over the past several years, evidence has been published suggesting cancer can be detected through the analysis of small volatile molecules analogous to an “odor.” By implementing a headspace SPME GC-MS exact mass ToF MS solution, an information rich data set can be generated that can be analyzed using a multivariate statistically approach to interpret patterns in the data set.

In this project, we are investigating the existence of a significant difference in detected small volatile molecules in the chromatographic “fingerprints” between patient blood with pancreatic cancer and blood from a “healthy” individual. Using freshly collected whole blood from health/normal volunteers and clinical patients diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer (pancreatic adenocarcinomas) in combination of molecular recognition studies and mass spectrometry structural characterization, we plan to carry out experimental studies to discover potential biomarkers for early detection of cancer.