Real-time glioblastoma tumor microenvironment assessment by SpiderMass for improved patient management

Glioblastoma is a highly heterogeneous and infiltrative form of brain cancer associated with a poor outcome and limited therapeutic effectiveness. The extent of the surgery is related to survival. Reaching an accurate diagnosis and prognosis assessment by the time of the initial surgery is therefore paramount in the management of glioblastoma. To this end, we are studying the performance of SpiderMass, an ambient ionization mass spectrometry technology that can be used in vivo without invasiveness, coupled to our recently established artificial intelligence pipeline. We demonstrate that we can both stratify isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH)-wild-type glioblastoma patients into molecular sub-groups and achieve an accurate diagnosis with over 90% accuracy after cross-validation. Interestingly, the developed method offers the same accuracy for prognosis. In addition, we are testing the potential of an immunoscoring strategy based on SpiderMass fingerprints, showing the association between prognosis and immune cell infiltration, to predict patient outcome.

Comparing MS imaging of lipids by WALDI and MALDI: two technologies for evaluating a common ground truth in MS imaging

In this study, we conducted a direct comparison of water-assisted laser desorption ionization (WALDI) and matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry imaging, with MALDI serving as the benchmark for label-free molecular tissue analysis in biomedical research. Specifically, we investigated the lipidomic profiles of several biological samples and calculated the similarity of detected peaks and Pearson's correlation of spectral profile intensities between the two techniques. We show that, overall, MALDI MS and WALDI MS present very close lipidomic analyses and that the highest similarity is obtained for the norharmane MALDI matrix. Indeed, for norharmane in negative ion mode, the lipidomic spectra revealed 100% similarity of detected peaks and over 0.90 intensity correlation between both technologies for five samples. The MALDI-MSI positive ion lipid spectra displayed more than 83% similarity of detected peaks compared to those of WALDI-MSI. However, we observed a lower percentage (77%) of detected peaks when comparing WALDI-MSI with MALDI-MSI due to the rich WALDI-MSI lipid spectra. Despite this difference, the global lipidomic spectra showed high consistency between the two technologies, indicating that they are governed by similar processes. Thanks to this similarity, we can increase datasets by including data from both modalities to either co-train classification models or obtain cross-interrogation.