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Diagnosis

Fishing for exosomes

Nature Reviews Cancer volume 15, page 453 (2015)Cite this article

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Exosomes are a type of extracellular vesicle that are secreted by all cells, including cancer cells. Exosomes contain various proteins, RNAs and DNA from the cell of origin, so they may be useful for diagnostics. However, a key issue has been how to determine which exosomes from the myriad in a blood sample are those derived from tumour cells.

Melo, Luecke, Kahlert et al. isolated exosomes from MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells, from transformed human fibroblast cell lines and from non-transformed control cell lines and carried out ultra-performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry to identify cancer-selective exosome markers. Of the 48 proteins that were only expressed by the cancer cell line-derived exosomes, only 1 was membrane-anchored: glypican 1 (GPC1), which is known to be overexpressed in breast cancer and PDAC. Circulating exosomes from nude mice with MDA-MB-231 xenografts also expressed GPC1, and the expression of GPC1 differentiated between circulating exosomes from the MDA-MB-231 tumours and those from non-tumour cells.

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References

  1. Melo, S. A. et al. Glypican-1 identifies cancer exosomes and detects early pancreatic cancer. Nature 523, 177–182 (2015)

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Authors
  1. Gemma K. Alderton
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Alderton, G. Fishing for exosomes. Nat Rev Cancer 15, 453 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc3990

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