De novo discovery of phenotypic intra-tumor heterogeneity using MALDI imaging mass spectrometry

摘要

Statistically significant differences in survival and metastasis were found, in which the presence of specific clones were associated with clinical outcome. Notably the explicit inclusion of intratumor heterogeneity in the data analysis pipeline enabled biomarkers to be identified that could not be found by comparing the average protein spectra from each patient's tumor regions. This result reflected the fact that the variable contribution of the phenotypic tumor clones to the total tumor content of the patient.