Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Chemotherapy is a primary treatment for the metastatic lung cancer patients. To select the most effective combination of drugs, we need an efficient way of assessing tumor response. Here, we showed that differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analysis of blood serum proteins could reveal the patient response to the treatment. If chemotherapy is effective, serum proteins DSC curve of non-small cellular lung cancer (NSCLC) case is similar to the those of the healthy individuals. If treatment fails, notable changes occur in the DSC profile of NSCLC patients blood serum. Our preliminary work illustrates how thermal analysis of changes in the heat capacity of blood serum proteins can provide an insight into patient response to chemotherapy - the essential information for any successive lung cancer treatment.