New approaches are required to understand the spatial heterogeneity within a tumor microenvironment (TME) if we are to elucidate information regarding the reprogramming mechanisms leading to immunosuppression and tumor progression. I will briefly discuss a new ToF-SIMS methodology for comprehensive lipidomic and metabolomic profiling of different types of individual cells on frozen-hydrated tissue sections. This new approach makes it is possible to integrate the spatial multi-omics profiling (metabolites, lipids and proteins) in the same tissue at single cell level, leading to new insights into the role of lipid reprogramming and metabolic response in normal regulation or pathogenic discoordination of cell-cell interactions in a variety of tissue microenvironments.
