Zaimenko I, et al. - Whether plasma metabolites could serve as biomarkers for stratification of stage II colorectal cancer (CRC) patients according to metastasis risk was assessed by retrospectively comparing metabolic profiles of plasma samples prospectively obtained before metastasis formation from non-metastasized vs metachronously metastasized stage II CRC patients of the German population-based case–control multicenter DACHS study. Findings revealed that, differentiation of non-metastasized stage II CRC patients from metachronously metastasized ones was enabled by metabolic profiles. An average accuracy of 0.75 (sensitivity 0.79, specificity 0.7) and 0.82 (sensitivity 0.85, specificity 0.77) was offered by classification models from decision trees and support vector machines with 10-fold cross-validation, respectively, correctly predicting metachronous metastasis in stage II CRC patients.