Evaluating Metabolite-Based Biomarkers for Early Diagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer: A Systematic Review

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the deadliest cancers, with five-year survival rates around 10%. The only curative option remains complete surgical resection, but due to the delay in diagnosis, less than 20% of patients are eligible for surgery. Therefore, discovering diagnostic biomarkers for early detection is crucial for improving clinical outcomes. Metabolomics has become a powerful technology for biomarker discovery, and several metabolomic-based panels have been proposed for PDAC diagnosis, but these advances have not yet been translated into the clinic. Therefore, this review focused on summarizing metabolites identified for the early diagnosis of PDAC in the last five years. Bibliographic searches were performed in the PubMed, Scopus and WOS databases, using the terms “Biomarkers, Tumor”, “Pancreatic Neoplasms”, “Early Diagnosis”, “Metabolomics” and “Lipidome” (January 2018–March 2023), and resulted in the selection of fourteen original studies that compared PDAC patients with subjects with other pancreatic diseases. These investigations showed amino acid and lipid metabolic pathways as the most commonly altered, reflecting their potential for biomarker research. Furthermore, other relevant metabolites such as glucose and lactate were detected in the pancreas tissue and body fluids from PDAC patients. Our results suggest that the use of metabolomics remains a robust approach to improve the early diagnosis of PDAC. However, these studies showed heterogeneity with respect to the metabolomics techniques used and further studies will be needed to validate the clinical utility of these biomarkers.