Mutuku SM, Spotbeen X, Trim PJ, Snel MF, Butler LM, Swinnen JV. Unravelling Prostate Cancer Heterogeneity Using Spatial Approaches to Lipidomics and Transcriptomics. Cancers (Basel). 2022 Mar 27;14(7):1702. doi: 10.3390/cancers14071702.

Contact: Lisa Butler

Due to advances in the detection and management of prostate cancer over the past 20 years, most cases of localised disease are now potentially curable by surgery or radiotherapy, or amenable to active surveillance without treatment.

However, this has given rise to a new dilemma for disease management; the inability to distinguish indolent from lethal, aggressive forms of prostate cancer, leading to substantial overtreatment of some patients and delayed intervention for others. Driving this uncertainty is the critical deficit of novel targets for systemic therapy and of validated biomarkers that can inform treatment decision-making and to select and monitor therapy.

In this review, we consider the principles of mass spectrometry-based lipid imaging and complementary gene-based spatial omics technologies and their application to prostate cancer and recent advancements in these technologies.

We put in perspective studies that describe spatially-resolved lipid maps and metabolic genes that are associated with prostate tumours compared to benign tissue and increased risk of disease progression, with the aim of evaluating the future implementation of spatial lipidomics and complementary transcriptomics for prognostication, target identification and treatment decision-making for prostate cancer.