In general, the present invention relates to identification of lipidome biomarkers for cancer analysis and it provides prognostic and predictive methods and kits for cancer diagnosis and subtyping and for diagnosing and/or predicting the evolution of a tumor and its response to lipid metabolism-targeted or other types of therapy in a subject, by making use of phospholipid (PL) profiling, wherein changes in the combined acyl chain length of intact body fluid-derived or tumor-derived phospholipid species is indicative of an elongation phenotype.