In this manuscript, we demonstrate the applicability of a metabolic liquid biopsy for the monitoring and staging of patients with lung cancer. This method provides an unbiased detection strategy to establish a more precise correlation between CTC quantification and the actual burden of disease, therefore improving the accuracy of staging based on current imaging techniques. Also, by applying statistical analysis techniques and probabilistic models to the metabolic status and distribution of peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) populations “perturbed” by the presence of CTCs, a new category of adaptive metabolic pattern biomarker (AMPB) is described and unambiguously correlated to the different clinical stages of the patients. In fact, this strategy allows for classification of different categories of disease within a single stage (stage IV) before computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans and with lower uncertainty.

在这篇手稿中，我们展示了代谢液体活检对肺癌患者监测和分期的适用性。该方法提供了一种公正的检测策略，可以在 CTC 定量和实际疾病负担之间建立更精确的相关性，从而提高基于当前成像技术的分期准确性。此外，通过将统计分析技术和概率模型应用于因 CTC 的存在而“扰乱”的外周血单核细胞 (PBMC) 群体的代谢状态和分布，描述了一种新类别的适应性代谢模式生物标志物 (AMPB) 并明确相关针对患者不同的临床阶段。事实上，该策略允许在计算机断层扫描 (CT) 和正电子发射断层扫描 (PET) 扫描之前的一个阶段（IV 阶段）内对不同类别的疾病进行分类，并且不确定性较低。