Fast Cancer Molecular Diagnosis from FFPE Tissues Based on Metabolic Profiles Using SpiderMass Technology

Formalin-fixation and paraffin-embedding (FFPE) is the worldwide gold standard for tissue preservation and routine material for general diagnostics and cancer in particular. Despite the fact that histology is complemented by other modalities such as in situ hybridization (ISH) or immunohistochemistry (IHC), the pathology can fail to provide the right diagnosis in a certain number of cases. Overall, the standard process is time-consuming, labor intensive and doesn’t reach the right sensitivity and specificity. Lipids are central players in cancer. Unfortunately, to this date lipids aren’t used for diagnostics and lipid analysis from FFPE has never been reported due to tissue processing which limits their detection. Here, we report a new method for cancer diagnostics based on their unique tissue-lipidomic signatures through rapid molecular screening of FFPE sections without dewaxing using Water-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry (WALDI-MS) - SpiderMass. Advantageously, the method does not require human intervention. The annotated tissues are first analyzed to train the system and then blind samples can be diagnosed in less than a few minutes. The platform was demonstrated for the diagnostics of canine and human sarcoma, including cases which are known to be problematic in the gold standard workflow. Interrogation of blind samples against the built models revealed over 95% probability values to discriminate specific subtypes