Novel NMR-Based Approach to Reveal the ‘Metabolic Fingerprint’ of Cytotoxic Gold Drugs in Cancer Cells

A combination of pathway enrichment and metabolite clustering analysis is used to interpret untargeted 1H NMR metabolomics data, enabling a biochemically informative comparison of the effects induced by a panel of known cytotoxic gold(I) and gold(III) compounds in A2780 ovarian cancer cells. The identification of the most dysregulated pathways for the major classes of compounds highlights specific chemical features that lead to common biological effects. The proposed approach may have broader applicability to the screening of metal-based drug candidate libraries, which is always complicated by their multitarget nature, and support the comprehensive interpretation of their metabolic actions.