Circulating disialoganglioside GD2 in neuroblastoma diagnosis

1 – Dmitry Rogachev National Research Center, Moscow, Russia; 2 – Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of bioorganic chemistry of RAS, Moscow, Russia

Cardiometry, Issue 24, November 2022

Conference Proceedings

Neuroblastoma is one of the most common solid tumors in children, characterized by high clinical heterogeneity and low predictability of the progression course. To assess the prognosis and response to therapy, protein tumor markers are often used, such as neuron-specific enolase, lactate dehydrogenase, ferritin as well as catecholamine metabolites: homovanillic acid, vanillylmandelic acid, 3-methoxytyramine, meta- and normetanephrine. Immunocytochemical studies have shown that many neuroblastomas are characterized by high surface expression of disialogangliaside GD2. In this case, well-differentiated tumors are often characterized by a lower level of GD2. It is known that GD2 can be detached from the cell surface and transported in the bloodstream as a part of the low density lipoprotein composition. In this connection, it is assumed that the concentration of GD2 in blood may depend on the presence of the tumor, its grade and mass.

Aims and methods . In our study, we analyzed the level of GD2 circulating in blood with the use of high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry in patients with histologically confirmed neuroblastoma and ganglioneuroblastoma (n=26), ganglioneuroma (n=1) as well as in the reference group, which covered patients ( n=25) with a suspected neurogenic tumor, which, after confirmation of the histological diagnosis, were characterized both by nontumor lesions (n=11) and various tumor diseases (n=14).

Preliminary results obtained with the above sampling showed a high specificity of the method in the detection of primary neuroblastoma with a plasma-related C18 GD2 lipoform cut-off threshold approximately of 35 nM. At the same time, a positive correlation was found between the concentration of the circulating GD2 and the tumor mass. As distinct from glycoproteins, gangliasides were characterized by high clearance, which makes GD2 a potentially useful marker of the response to therapy. We observed a rapid pronounced decrease in the level of GD2 during resection of a large tumor formation. In some individual cases, an increase in the level of the circulating GD2 was also observed in the disease recurrences. At present, we have been collecting the relevant data to increase the sampling sizes in order to improve the statistical significance of this study.