Applications of Lipidomics in Tumor Diagnosis and Therapy

Lipids have many critical biological functions in cancer. There are characteristic changes of lipid metabolism and metabolites in different physiological and pathological processes. Lipidomics is an emerging discipline of metabolomics for systematic analysis of lipids in organisms, tissues, or cells and the molecules that interact with them. With the development of new analytical techniques, especially the application and development of mass spectrometry techniques, the determination of lipids can be carried out quickly and accurately and has a high throughput. A large number of studies have shown that abnormal lipid metabolism is closely related to the occurrence and development of tumors. The application of lipidomics technology can reveal changes in lipids and relative abnormal metabolic pathways associated with tumors. Moreover, it shows a wide range of application prospects in the identification of tumor lipid biomarkers, early tumor diagnosis, and the discovery of antitumor drug targets. This chapter mainly introduces the application and development direction of lipidomics in the diagnosis and therapy of different tumors.