Kirill Veselkov
Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Chromatogr Sep Tech
Over 800 million pathology tests are performed in the UK alone each year, and over 95% of all clinical patient pathways rely on access to effective pathology services. The ??gold standard? for diagnostics is tissue biopsy and histo-pathological assessment. There is an increasing demand for cancer diagnostics with improved quality, safety, efficiency and lower costs. Mass spectrometry Imaging (MSI) has the potential to deliver a paradigm shift in digital pathology services and cancer diagnostics because it augments cellular morphological analysis with highly accurate and robust data on cellular metabolic and proteomic molecular content. Effective clinical translation of histology-driven MSI in systems oncology requires precise co-localization of morphological and biochemical features as well as advanced methods for data treatment and interrogation. This presentation outlines current roadblocks in translational MSI and introduces a comprehensive workflow designed to address current methodological limitations. I show that this strategy offers unique insights into tumour micro-environmental biochemistry; tumour induced heterogeneity of molecular phenotypes and should facilitate the compilation of a large-scale tissue morphologyspecific MSI spectral database to pursue next-generation, fully automated histological approaches.