Metabolic profiling of pteridines for determination of potential biomarkers in cancer diseases.

Cancer disease is the second leading cause of death in the world. Epidemiology data indicate that early diagnosis of a tumour increases a patient's chance of recovery. Biomarkers are effective instruments which can potentially lead to precancer screening or precancer diagnosis and may provide useful information on the cancer type and the disease's stage of progression. The analysis of new biomarkers for cancer is currently a popular area of study in clinical and cancer research. Pteridines are a class of potential cancer biomarkers. The monitoring levels of pteridines may have prospective value for controlling the course of the malignant process. This review describes the functional employment of pteridines, as biomarkers, in cancer diagnosis. It also contains the description of application of analytical techniques such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and capillary electrophoresis (CE) used for pteridine analysis.

Metabolomics in urogenital cancer.

Although in recent decades the development of many drugs against cancer has been witnessed, the morbidity and mortality for the most prevalent urogenital cancer have not been significantly reduced. A key task in cancer medicine is to detect the disease as early as possible. In order to achieve this, many new technologies have been developed for cancer biomarker discovery. Monitoring fluctuations of certain metabolite levels in body fluids, such as urine, has become an important way to detect early stages in carcinogenesis. Moreover metabolomic approaches are likely to be used to screen for potential diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers of urogenital cancer. In future work, these potential biomarkers should be further validated with a large enough patient cohort to achieve earlier diagnosis not only of urogenital cancer, but also other malignancies. Moreover, the improvement of patient prognosis will be another aim of such investigations. This novel metabolomic approach has the potential to provide more information about the pathophysiological status of an organism and distinguish precancerous and cancerous stages.

Disposition of drugs of abuse and their metabolites in wastewater as a method of the estimation of drug consumption.

The occurrence of drugs and trace amounts of their metabolites in the aqueous environment has become a global problem. Nowadays, general information about drug use patterns results from indirect methods such as anonymous surveys and police crime statistics. Unfortunately, these sources of information determine drug use consumption indirectly and give only rough estimations about drug use trends. Therefore, in order to assess the real extent of this phenomenon, new objective tools are needed to monitor drug abuse on a large social and international scale. Several analytical methods have been developed to diagnose illicit drug consumption. GC-MS and HPLC-MS are the techniques of choice for the quantitative analysis of illicit drugs and their metabolites in clinical and forensic toxicology. These separation methods have been widely used for the determination of the occurrence of stimulatory drugs in different biological matrixes such as blood, urine, sweat, saliva and hair. Recently, a new direct and objective approach of monitoring drug use patterns has been proposed to estimate illicit drug consumption involving the measurement of urinary breakdown products in waste- and surface water. The approach proposed seems to be suitable for monitoring consumption in real time so that it is possible to identify trends in drug use patterns. The measurement of illicit drug residue in wastewater and surface water might become a standardized tool for the comprehensive assessment of drug abuse in populations.