Visualizing Cancer Heterogeneity at the Molecular and Cellular Levels: Lessons from Rosetta.

Understanding tumor heterogeneity is a major challenge that was recognized as one of the first Cancer Grand Challenges, with a call to provide solutions to visualize tumor heterogeneity. The Rosetta team took on this challenge, exploiting advances in spatial-omics approaches centered around mass spectrometry imaging to map tumor heterogeneity at the cellular and molecular scales with different levels of resolution. See related article by Bressan et al.

Cancer Biology and the Perioperative Period: Opportunities for Disease Evolution and Challenges for Perioperative Care.

Efforts to deconvolve the complex interactions of cancer cells with other components of the tumor micro- and macro-environment have exposed a common tendency for cancers to subvert systems physiology and exploit endogenous programs involved in homeostatic control of metabolism, immunity, regeneration, and repair. Many such programs are engaged in the healing response to surgery which, together with other abrupt biochemical changes in the perioperative period, provide an opportunity for the macroevolution of residual disease. This review relates contemporary perspectives of cancer as a systemic disease with the overlapping biology of host responses to surgery and events within the perioperative period.

Testing of rapid evaporative mass spectrometry for histological tissue classification and molecular diagnostics in a multi-site study.

Background: While REIMS technology has successfully been demonstrated for the histological identification of ex-vivo breast tumor tissues, questions regarding the robustness of the approach and the possibility of tumor molecular diagnostics still remain unanswered. In the current study, we set out to determine whether it is possible to acquire cross-comparable REIMS datasets at multiple sites for the identification of breast tumors and subtypes.

Methods: A consortium of four sites with three of them having access to fresh surgical tissue samples performed tissue analysis using identical REIMS setups and protocols.

A novel Na1.5-dependent feedback mechanism driving glycolytic acidification in breast cancer metastasis.

Solid tumours have abnormally high intracellular [Na]. The activity of various Na channels may underlie this Na accumulation. Voltage-gated Na channels (VGSCs) have been shown to be functionally active in cancer cell lines, where they promote invasion.

Morphological and molecular preservation through universal preparation of fresh-frozen tissue samples for multimodal imaging workflows.

The landscape of tissue-based imaging modalities is constantly and rapidly evolving. While formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded material is still useful for histological imaging, the fixation process irreversibly changes the molecular composition of the sample. Therefore, many imaging approaches require fresh-frozen material to get meaningful results.