中文摘要：

本文对近年来用于癌症诊断的新方法——代谢组学及其在该领域内的应用进行了简要介绍。代谢组学通过定性与定量测量生物样本（血液、尿液、组织等）中数以千计的小分子代谢物,可灵敏地反映代谢组中与病理状态有关的细微变化,从而可为癌症的早期诊断及更好地理解癌变过程提供一种新颖的思路。本文还讨论了代谢组学与系统生物学中其它一些组学在癌症检测上的关联,介绍了一些用代谢组学进行不同癌症的诊断、治疗监测以及药物开发的前期研究工作,并探讨了用于临床癌症诊断的代谢组学方法所面临的机遇、挑战与未来发展方向。

英文摘要：

In this review,we aim to introduce a relatively new approach,metabolomics,and explore its potential for cancer diagnosis.We will briefly introduce the concept of metabolomics and its relationship with other omics studies in systems biology for cancer detection.The field of metabolomics focuses on the parallel measurement of hundreds of small molecule metabolites in biological samples such as blood,urine,and biopsied tissue.Since metabolite levels are sensitive to subtle changes in the pathological status,metabolomics promises novel avenues for early cancer detection and a better understanding of cancer processes.In fact,many previous metabolomics studies have clearly demons-trated the promises of metabolomics not only for the diagnosis of various kinds of cancer,but also for therapeutic monitoring as well as for drug development.In addition,in this review we will discuss the challenges and future directions for developing metabolomics methods towards clinical applications for cancer diagnosis.