Electroporation-based proteome sampling ex vivo enables the detection of brain melanoma protein signatures in a location proximate to visible tumor margins

A major concern in tissue biopsies with a needle is missing the most lethal clone of a tumor, leading to a false negative result. This concern is well justified, since needle-based biopsies gather tissue information limited to needle size. In this work, we show that molecular harvesting with electroporation, e-biopsy, could increase the sampled tissue volume in comparison to tissue sampling by a needle alone. Suggested by numerical models of electric fields distribution, the increased sampled volume is achieved by electroporation-driven permeabilization of cellular membranes in the tissue around the sampling needle. We show that proteomic profiles, sampled by e-biopsy from the brain tissue, ex vivo, at 0.5mm distance outside the visible margins of mice brain melanoma metastasis, have protein patterns similar to melanoma tumor center and different from the healthy brain tissue. In addition, we show that e-biopsy probed proteome signature differentiates between melanoma tumor center and healthy brain in mice. This study suggests that e-biopsy could provide a novel tool for a minimally invasive sampling of molecules in tissue in larger volumes than achieved with traditional needle biopsies.