Discovery of biomarkers for Tasmanian devil cancer (DFTD) by metabolic profiling of serum.

Devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) is a transmissible cancer threatening Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) with extinction. There is no preclinical test available for DFTD, and thus our aim was to find biomarkers for DFTD by metabolic fingerprinting. Seventy serum samples from wild Tasmanian devils (35 controls, 35 with tumors) were analyzed by liquid chromatography–high-resolution mass spectrometry. Features were selected by multivariate models (PLS/DA, random forests) comparing age-matched training set (n = 20 × 2) and further complying with fold-change threshold (≥1.4) and Mann–Whitney U-tests with correction for multiple hypotheses (false discovery rate (FDR) q 0.45, p < 0.01). Additional potential mar...