On 17 August, NSFC published the program to be funded and rejected. According to the statistics, totally 179 programs related to exosome research have been supported, funds doubled to last year. Concerns on this area in biomedical research have risen to top 1 from top 3 in 2015.
Exosome is an Extracellular Vesicle (EV) with 30-150nm in diameters, discharged by all cells, in the form of proteins, lipids and nucleic acids. They are observed in normal physiological processes and disease development, many in cancer research.
Three mechanisms are studied in cancer cell’s communication with other cells in the microenvironment. First, less invasive tumor cells can become more malignant by taking up microRNAs secreted by invasive tumor cells in exosomes (Melo et al, 2014). Second, cancer cells can communicate with other cells in the tumor microenvironment through exosomes (Zhou et al, 2014). Third, the communication involves exosomes derived from normal cells, which can alter the behavior of tumor cells (Zhang et al, 2015).
The levels of exosomes in blood have been correlated with tumor development, thus some markers are used for cancer diagnosis. A recent study illustrated glypican-1 circulating exosomes in detecting early pancreatic cancer (Melo et al, 2015).
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