Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second commonest and the fifth deadliest male cancer worldwide. The key diagnostic challenge in PCa is differentiating indolent from clinically significant disease as the latter requires more stringent follow-up and/or immediate treatment. Imaging metabolic alterations that occur throughout tumorigenesis is a promising approach for addressing this unmet clinical need. Hyperpolarized [1-13C]pyruvate MRI (HP-13C-MRI) is an emerging clinical imaging technique that can visualize real-time pyruvate-to-lactate conversion that is a known hallmark of cancer metabolism. The recent Nature Communications study by Sushentsev and colleagues has shown the potential of HP-13C-MRI to deliver intra-grade PCa metabolic phenotyping capable of differentiating between indolent and clinically significant intermediate-risk disease. Importantly, the HALO Tissue Classifier and Membrane modules were used to measure immunohistochemical expression of monocarboxylate transporters 1 and 4, confirming that HP-13C-MRI specifically visualizes tumor epithelial metabolism that was significantly different from that of PCa stroma. The FISH module was deployed to assess epithelial mRNA expression of lactate dehydrogenase A and B, which was significantly higher in more aggressive tumors. Overall, using HALO to spatially resolve the digital pathology element of this study helped biologically validate HP-13C-MRI findings and led to new hypotheses for current projects.   

• Learn how to use HALO Tissue Classifier module to spatially resolve different tissue subtypes in human prostate cancer 
• Learn how to use HALO Membrane module to extract cell-type-specific membrane transporter expression patterns 
• Learn how to use HALO FISH module to analyze cell-type-specific spatial transcriptomics data