Decoding Breast Cancer Metabolism: Hunting BRCA Mutations by Raman Spectroscopy

Abstract

Presented study included human blood from healthy people and patients with BReast CAncer gene (BRCA) mutation. We used Raman spectroscopy for BRCA mutation detection and the bioanalytical characterization of pathologically changed samples. The aim of this study is to evaluate the Raman biomarkers to distinguish blood samples from healthy people and patients with BRCA mutation. We demonstrated that Raman spectroscopy is a powerful technique to distinguish between healthy blood and blood with BRCA mutation and to characterize the biochemical composition of samples. We applied partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) to discriminate BRCA1/2 mutations and control samples without the mutations based on vibrational features. The sensitivity and specificity for calibration obtained directly from PLS-DA are equal to 94.2% and 97.6% and for cross-validation are equal to 93.3% and 97%. Our combination (Raman spectroscopy and PLS-DA) provides quick methods to reliably visualize the biochemical differences in human blood plasma. We proved that Raman spectroscopy combined with the chemometric method is a promising tool for hunting BRCA mutation in breast cancer.