Final Report Summary - DESI_JEDI-IMAGING (Development of mass spectrometric techniques for 3D imaging and in-vivo analysis of biological tissues)
The project was aimed at the development of tissue identification techniques which work in various medical environments ranging from histopathology to surgery. The main hypothesis of the project was that biological tissues express a characteristic metabolic fingerprint, which can be directly detected by means of molecular spectroscopy. The project utilized mass spectrometry, one of the most emerging molecular spectroscopic tools nowadays, due to its high sensitivity, unparalleled specificity and ease of spectral interpretation. One of the overarching theme of the project was the mapping the spectroscopically accessible tissue metabolome over all known healthy and diseased mammalian tissue types and study its dependence on gender, age and dietary conditions. The study revealed that the complex lipid profile of mammalian cells provide a conservative fingerprint for the unambiguous identification of tissues. In a parallel fashion, building on this discovery, novel mass spectrometric techniques capable of in-vivo, in-situ analysis were developed with the aim of establishing the concept of mass spectrometry-guided surgery. In course of the project a number of surgical dissection instruments were combined with real-time mass spectrometric detection, leading to a technology generally termed "Intelligent Surgical Device" or "iKnife". These devices are fully functional surgical tools, with the additional function of in-situ tissue identification, which is particularly useful in case of cancer surgery, where the distribution of cancer cells must be precisely mapped in order to achieve complete tumour resection without the removal of large amounts of healthy tissues. The new technology is expected to replace the currently used, so-called frozen section histology, which takes 30-40 minutes (!) for the identification of tumour cells on the surgical margin. In contrast, the new, mass spectrometric device requires 2-3 seconds for tissue identification. The device was successfully tested in clinical environment for various types of cancer and it's expected to receive regulatory approval within the following 2-3 years of time.