Monitoring tyrosine kinase inhibitor therapeutic responses with a panel of metabolic biomarkers in chronic myeloid leukemia patients

The aim of this study is to investigate the potential biomarkers associated with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), reveal the metabolite changes related to the continuous phases of tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), and find the potential biomarkers associated with treatment effects. Fifty‐two patients with CML and 26 matched healthy people were enrolled as the discovery set. Another 194 randomly selected CML patients treated with TKI were chosen as the external validation set. Plasma samples from the patients and controls were profiled using the gas chromatography‐mass spectrometry‐based metabonomic approach. Multivariate and univariate statistical analyses were combined to select the differential metabolic features. The gas chromatography‐mass spectrometry‐based metabolomics showed a clear clustering and separation of metabolic patterns from healthy controls and pre‐ and post‐TKI treatment CML patients in the discovery set. We identified 9 metabolites that differentiated CML patients from healthy controls, including lactic acid, isoleucine, glycerol, glycine, myristic acid, d‐sorbitol, d‐galactose, d‐glucose, and myo‐inositol. Among the 9 markers, glycerol and myristic acid had the most significant association with TKI treatment effects in both discovery and external validation sets. In the receiver operating characteristic analysis, the combination of glycerol and myristic acid showed a better discrimination performance compared to a single biomarker. The results indicated that metabolic profiling has the potential for diagnosis of CML and the panel of biomarkers including myristic acid and glycerol could be useful in monitoring TKI therapeutic responses.