Advances in Lipidomics for Cancer Biomarkers Discovery

Abstract

Lipids play critical functions in cellular survival, proliferation, interaction and death, since they are involved in chemical-energy storage, cellular signaling, cell membranes, and cell–cell interactions. These cellular processes are strongly related to carcinogenesis pathways, particularly to transformation, progression, and metastasis, suggesting the bioactive lipids are mediators of a number of oncogenic processes. The current review gives a synopsis of a lipidomic approach in tumor characterization; we provide an overview on potential lipid biomarkers in the oncology field and on the principal lipidomic methodologies applied. The novel lipidomic biomarkers are reviewed in an effort to underline their role in diagnosis, in prognostic characterization and in prediction of therapeutic outcomes. A lipidomic investigation through mass spectrometry highlights new insights on molecular mechanisms underlying cancer disease. This new understanding will promote clinical applications in drug discovery and personalized therapy.

Differential diagnosis of human lung tumors using surface desorption atmospheric pressure chemical ionization imaging mass spectrometry

“…[42][43][44][45][46]55,56 A signi-cant increase in multiple phosphatidylcholines (PCs) and a decrease in several specic sphingomyelins (SMs) were observed from tumor to adjacent normal tissue particularly, enhanced levels of choline (C 5 in the MALDI-Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (MALDI-FTICR MS), the potassium or sodium adducts form mechanism of which is the same as the result of this study. 46,58 Different formations of these ions produced are contributed to the different main ionization mechanisms of ESI and DAPCI, which are complementary for compounds identi-cation and potential biomarkers discovery.…”

Live single cell mass spectrometry reveals cancer‐specific metabolic profiles of circulating tumor cells

“…GPLs. [64][65][66][67] The synthesis of GPLs was proved to be a key factor in cancer proliferation as it is mainly responsible for membrane and energy production. 68 Because GPL synthesis requires acetyl-CoA, and citrate is an acetyl-CoA donor for this process, higher lipid metabolism can be associated with elevated tricarboxylic acid cycle activity in GC.…”

Recent progresses of derivatization approaches in the targeted lipidomics analysis by mass spectrometry

“…A comprehensive list of vast lipids classes and subclasses combined with their common abbreviations can be found in the classification system provided by Lipid MAPS consortium [8]. Lipidomics studies can provide critical insights toward the development of an improved understanding of lipids metabolism and for the identification of new biomarkers or therapeutic targets of related diseases mentioned above [3,[9][10][11][12][13]. In the past 5 years, a variety of reviews have been published on the applications of lipidomics in different aspects, such as infection and inflammation [14], biology and medicine [10,15,16], clinical lipidomics [17,18], and lipid peroxidation-related diseases [19][20][21].…”