Metabolomic imaging of prostate cancer with magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry

Abstract

Metabolomic imaging of prostate cancer (PCa) aims to improve in vivo imaging capability so that PCa tumors can be localized non-invasively to guide biopsy and evaluated for aggressiveness prior to prostatectomy, as well as to assess and monitor PCa growth for newly biopsy-diagnosed, asymptomatic PCa patients. Metabolomics studies global variations of metabolites with which malignancy conditions can be evaluated by profiling the entire measurable metabolome, instead of focusing only on certain metabolites or isolated metabolic pathways. At present, the study of PCa metabolomics is mainly accomplished utilizing magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and mass spectrometry (MS). With MRS imaging, the anatomic image, obtained from magnetic resonance imaging, is mapped with values of disease condition-specific metabolomic profiles calculated from MRS of each location. For example, imaging of removed whole prostates demonstrated the ability of metabolomic profiles to differentiate cancerous foci from histologically benign regions. Additionally, MS metabolomic imaging of prostate biopsies uncovered metabolomic expression patterns that could discriminate between PCa and benign tissue. Metabolomic imaging offers the potential to identify cancer lesions to guide prostate biopsy and evaluate PCa aggressiveness non-invasively in vivo, or ex vivo to increase the power of pathology analysis. Potentially, this imaging ability could be possible not only with PCa, but applied to different tissues and organs to evaluate other human malignancies or metabolic diseases.

Prostate cancer imaging

“…While PET imaging with radiotracers targeting alterations of particular biochemical pathways have proven to be successful in many cancers, metabolic profiles may have even greater potential for diagnosis and disease monitoring. In this issue, Spur et al review methods and results based on MRS and mass spectrometry (MS) in prostate cancer [17]. While MS requires sampling of tissue (or body fluids), it can assay large numbers of metabolites at low concentrations.…”

Nmr Metabolomics of Renal Cancer: an Overview

“…Either NMR-or MS-based, the metabolomics approach has found a wide scope of applications in disease research and, in particular, in cancer research, since altered metabolism is a recognized important cancer hallmark [18,19], with cancer cells exhibiting a distinct metabolic behavior to normal cells and impacting on systemic metabolism. The significant increase in the number of reports on cancer metabolomics, in recent years, is illustrated by many recent reviews, either generally addressing cancer research [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] or dedicated to a specific cancer type (Table 1) [12,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. This reflects the recognized importance of assessing metabolic changes related to tumor onset and progression as part of a novel biomarkers discovery avenue toward improved methodologies for cancer detection and monitoring.…”

Metabolomic Imaging for Human Prostate Cancer Detection using MR Spectroscopy at 7-T

“…Furthermore, compared to mass spectrometry (MS), MRS has the significant advantage of a possible in vivo translation, as the histological structure of tissue samples is not altered during analysis 61 .…”

“…After the first successful application of the MRSI technique within brain tumor research, the method was implemented to PCa studies 61,85 . It has been shown that the combination of MRS and MRI significantly improved the cancer detection rate compared to each method alone 86 .…”