Bioanalytical methods for metabolomic profiling: Detection of head and neck cancer, including oral cancer

Abstract Metabolomics is an emerging field dealing with the measurement and interpretation of small molecular byproducts of biochemical processes, or metabolites, which can be used to generate profiles from biological samples. Promising for use in pathophysiology, metabolomic profiles give the immediate biological state of a sample. These profiles are altered in diseases and are detectable in biological samples, such as tissue, blood, urine, saliva, and others. Most remarkably, metabolic profiles usually are altered before symptoms appear in a patient. For this reason, metabolomics has potential as a reliable method for an early diagnosis of diseases through disease biomarker identification. This application is most prevalent in cancer, such as head and neck cancer (HNC). Metabolomic studies offer avenues to improve on current medical techniques through the application of mass spectrometry (MS), nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), and statistical analysis to determine better biomarkers than those currently known. In this review, we discuss the use of MS and NMR tools for detecting biomarkers in tissue and fluid samples, and the appropriateness of metabolomics in analyzing cancer. Advantages, disadvantages, and recent studies on metabolomic profiling techniques in HNC analysis are also discussed herein.