Fecal metagenomics classifiers better than salivary-based classifiers for identifying pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n
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WEDNESDAY, March 9, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Fecal microbiota-based screening seems feasible for early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), according to a study published online March 8 in Gut<\/em>.<\/p>\n Ece Kartal, Ph.D., from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues applied shotgun metagenomic and 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to samples from a Spanish case-control study with 57 cases, 50 controls, and 29 patients with chronic pancreatitis in the discovery phase and from a Germany case-control study with 76 participants in the validation phase. Fecal and salivary microbiota were explored as potential diagnostic biomarkers.<\/p>\n The researchers found that compared with salivary-based classifiers, fecal metagenomic classifiers performed much better, identifying PDAC patients with an accuracy of up to 0.84 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) based on a set of 27 microbial species. Accuracy was consistent across early and late disease stages. When microbiome-based predictions were combined with serum levels of carbohydrate antigen 19-9, performance further improved up to 0.94 AUROC. When validated against 25 publicly available metagenomic study populations for distinct health conditions, a microbiota-based classification model confined to PDAC-enriched species was highly disease-specific. In the validation population, both microbiome-based models had high prediction accuracy. Using 16S rRNA sequencing and fluorescence in situ hybridization, several fecal PDAC marker species were detectable in pancreatic tumor and nontumor tissue.<\/p>\n “The described fecal microbiome signatures enabled robust metagenomic classifiers for PDAC detection at high disease specificity, complementary to existing markers, and with potential towards cost-effective PDAC screening and monitoring,” the authors write.<\/p>\n Several authors have a pending patent application of early detection of pancreatic cancer based on microbial markers.<\/p>\n Abstract\/Full Text<\/a><\/p>\n