Updated Progress on Mass Spectrometry Imaging and its Application in Cancer Treatment and Drug Discovery

Background: Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is an imaging method based on mass spectrometry technology that can simultaneously visualize the spatial distribution of various biological molecules. The use of MSI in cancer detection and drug discovery has been extensively investigated in recent years. Objective: This review aims to summarize the latest advances of MSI and its specific applications in cancer detection and drug discovery, providing a basic understanding of the development and application of MSI in the past five years and offering references for the further application of MSI in cancer detection and drug discovery. Methods: In the database, "mass spectrometry imaging", "cancer treatment", and "drug discovery" were used as keywords for literature retrieval, and the time range was limited to "2018- 2023". After organizing and analyzing the literature and patents, a review was conducted. Results: Based on the literature, it was found that the updated progress of MSI in the past five years mostly focused on concrete methods, operation procedures, facilities, and composite applications. The patents of MSI were mainly correlated with the mass spectrometry imaging system and its application in cancer treatment. MSI is conducive to investigating the therapeutic schedule of cancer and searching for new drugs. Conclusion: MSI is a convenient, fast and powerful technology that has made great progress in sample preparation, instrumentation, quantitation, and multimodal imaging. MSI has emerged as a powerful technique in various biomedical applications, which has strong potential in cancer detection, treatment, formation mechanism research, discovery of biomarkers, and drug discovery process.