Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) is a cancer of the lymphatic system where the lymphoid and hematopoietic tissues are infiltrated by malignant neoplasms of B, T, and natural killer lymphocytes. Effective and less invasive methods for NHL screening are urgently needed. Herein, we report an untargeted gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) method to investigate metabolic changes in non-volatile derivatized compounds from urine samples of NHL patients (N = 15) and compare them to healthy controls (N = 34). Uni- and multivariate data analysis showed 18 endogenous metabolites, including amino acids and their metabolites, sugars, small organic acids, and vitamins, as statistically significant for group differentiation. A receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) generated from a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm-based model achieved 0.998 of predictive accuracy, displaying the potential and relevance of GC-MS-detected urinary non-volatile compounds for predictive purposes. Furthermore, a specific panel of key metabolites was also evaluated, showing similar results. All in all, our results indicate that this robust GC-MS method is an effective screening tool for NHL diagnosis and it is able to highlight different pathways of the disease.

非霍奇金淋巴瘤（NHL）是淋巴系统的癌症，淋巴系统和造血组织被B，T和自然杀伤性淋巴细胞的恶性肿瘤浸润。迫切需要有效且侵入性小的NHL筛查方法。在此，我们报告了一种非目标气相色谱-质谱（GC-MS）方法，用于研究来自NHL患者（N  = 15）尿液中非挥发性衍生化合物的代谢变化，并将其与健康对照进行比较（N = 34）。单变量和多变量数据分析显示18种内源性代谢物，包括氨基酸及其代谢物，糖，小有机酸和维生素，对组分化具有统计学意义。从基于支持向量机（SVM）算法的模型生成的接收器工作特性曲线（ROC）达到了0.998的预测精度，显示了GC-MS检测到的尿液非挥发性化合物用于预测目的的潜力和相关性。此外，还评估了一组特定的关键代谢产物，显示出相似的结果。总而言之，我们的结果表明，这种可靠的GC-MS方法是用于NHL诊断的有效筛选工具，它能够突出显示该疾病的不同途径。