Metabolomics: a novel way to diagnose cGVHD?

In this issue of Blood, Subburaj et al report on results from using metabolomics (the science of studying small molecules known as metabolites) to measure the metabolites in biofluids, cells, and tissues. They longitudinally followed 222 pediatric and adolescent patients from 27 international transplantation centers as part of the prospective Predictive Biomarkers for Pediatric Chronic Graft-Versus-Host Disease (ABLE-cGVHD) biomarker trial.1 Risk-assignment analysis of centrally stored and analyzed plasma samples on days +100 to 114 after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) and onset analysis at diag-nosis of chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) showed that plasma a-ketoglutaric acid was consistently elevated both before and at onset of cGVHD in multiregression analysis. Furthermore, metabolomic profiling allowed late acute GVHD (aGVHD) to be distinguished from cGVHD.

Automated summary

This study utilized metabolomics to measure metabolites in different samples and found that plasma α-ketoglutaric acid was consistently elevated before and at the onset of chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) in pediatric and adolescent patients.