High-grade sarcoma diagnosis and prognosis: Biomarker discovery by mass spectrometry imaging

The combination of high heterogeneity, both intratumoral and intertumoral, with their rarity has made diagnosis, prognosis of high-grade sarcomas difficult. There is an urgent need for more objective molecular biomarkers, to differentiate between the many different subtypes, and to also provide new treatment targets. Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) has amply demonstrated its ability to identify potential new markers for patient diagnosis, survival, metastasis and response to therapy in cancer research. In this study, we investigated the ability of MALDIMSI of proteins to distinguish between high-grade osteosarcoma (OS), leiomyosarcoma (LMS), myxofibrosarcoma (MFS) and undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma (UPS) (N-total = 53). We also investigated if there are individual proteins or protein signatures that are statistically associated with patient survival. Twenty diagnostic protein signals were found characteristic for specific tumors (p