Prospective Application of Lipidomics in Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is a disease that affects men worldwide and places a medical and socioeconomic burden on modern society. Significant challenges remain in understanding the oncogenesis of prostate cancer, finding sensitive and specific methods for early diagnosis, and, in identifying effective interventions for prevention and treatment of prostate cancer. Lipidomics, a rapidly developing research field, is able to identify, quantify and profile thousands of individual lipid species at one time from a small specimen. Lipidomics is extremely sensitive technology; it can detect less abundant lipid species at pmol level [1]. With highly automated nanoLC-MS-based approach, the detecting sensitivity can reach to attomol level [2]. Lipidomics has been widely studied in many non-cancer areas, and in some cancers, such as in pancreatic adenocarcinoma, thyroid cancer, colon cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, glioblastoma, [2-6] and prostate cancer [1,7,8]. Taking prostate cancer as an example, discussed here are the applications of lipidomics in cancer research.