De Novo Discovery of Tumor Subpopulations Linked to Metastasis and Poor Prognosis Using MALDI MSI

摘要

An essential and so far unresolved factor influencing the evolution of cancer and the clinical management of patients is intra-tumor clonal heterogeneity; specifically the identification of which clones effect patient outcome. Using MALDI imaging mass spectrometry combined with a corroborated unsupervised statistical classifier we are able to characterize the biomolecular heterogeneity in tumor tissues; linking the presence of clones to clinical data enables the identification of clinically detrimental tumor clones. The ability to directly measure the spatial localization of biomolecules in an untargeted manner is indispensable for precise pathological analysis. This is especially true of biomolecular intratumor heterogeneity, in which molecularly distinct subpopulations may have identical morphologies.