Leveraging SFC/MS to Broaden Plasma Biomarker Metabolite Profiling

Recognizing a tractable metabolite biomarker can provide significant advancement in early disease detection and subsequent treatment. Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) has proven to be a complementary normal-phase approach to standard reverse-phase LC/MS, which is often times employed in metabolite profiling. For this work, SFC/MS was evaluated to expand profiling of non-polar metabolites from a collection of prostate cancer patients. SFC/MS metabolite analysis was performed on plasma samples prepared by conventional protein precipitation, as well as, off-line albumin depletion affinity chromatography to release albumin-bound metabolites. To further broaden detection of non-polar metabolites by MS, photoionization was employed in combination with APCI. Each of these approaches to enhance SFC biomarker analysis has been explored and will be presented.