Panels of serum metabolic biomarkers and methods of their use in detecting and diagnosing cancer, especially ovarian cancer, are disclosed. The metabolic biomarker panels include 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 75, 100, 150, or more metabolites. Supervised classification methods, such as trained support vector machines (SVMs) are used to determine whether the levels of metabolic biomarkers in a subject are indicative of the presence of cancer. The disclosed biomarkers and methods preferably allow a diagnosis of cancer with an accuracy, a specificity, and/or a sensitivity of at least 80%, 85%, 90%, 95%, 96%, 97%, 98% or 99%.