Chapter 7: Recent Advances in the Multivariate Chemometric Analysis of Cancer Metabolic Profiling

Metabolomics has emerged as a powerful metabolic profiling method for analysing various biological samples based on metabolite changes during pathogenesis. Comparing the metabolic profiles of human tissues or cells between healthy tissue and tumours is potentially applicable to the diagnosis of tumour onset and development and the development of therapeutics. For this purpose, non-invasive chemometric methods have been developed to probe the composition of endogenous materials. Recent progress in the field of metabolomics has strongly suggested that biochemical and spectral data obtained by spectroscopic/spectrometric techniques coupled with MV statistical methods and pattern recognition programs are advantageous for discriminating the metabolic profiles of tumours and healthy control tissues, and such abilities are obviously linked to gaining an understanding of the molecular basis for the accurate and non-invasive clinical diagnosis and further development of biomarkers. In this chapter, progress on cancer metabolomics is discussed. In particular, the recent application of chemometric and MV data analysis for infrared spectroscopy, magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry data is reviewed.