Key words: breast cancer, heterogeneity, molecular characterization, spatial analysis, identification, quantitation

"Spatial Omics to Quantitatively Study Tissue Heterogeneity"

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is an analytical technique for the analysis of the spatial distribution of molecules in biological tissues. It has been shown that it constitutes a unique tool for the investigation of intratumour heterogeneity by being able to segment histologically undistinguishable tumour areas into distinct tumour subpopulations. There is a strong interest in understanding the biology of these tumour populations. However, the analytical depth of MSI (meaning the identification of molecules) is limited. Therefore, in this project, the researchers wanted to couple MSI that enables to highlight tumour subpopulations with another mass spectrometry-based technique (LC-MS) to identify thousands of molecules. This will allow the comprehensive molecular characterization of intratumor heterogeneity to obtain deeper insights into the biological processes of cancer.

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