Despite enormous research strides, detection methods for many diseases remain cumbersome and expensive, and often uncover illness only at advanced stages, when patient outcomes can be bleak. One such illness is pancreatic cancer, which may display no obvious symptoms in its early stages, yet can develop aggressively. Indeed, according to the American Cancer Society, a staggering 80 percent of those stricken with this form of cancer die within 1 year of diagnosis.
Now, however, Tony Hu, a researcher in the Biodesign Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics and his colleagues have devised a crafty method to identify pancreatic cancer early in its development. Their technique relies on the sensitive detection of extracellular vesicles (EVs) tiny bubbles of material emitted from most living cells.
In new research appearing in the advanced online issue of the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Hu and his colleagues describe a method to detect EVs derived from tumors that carry a particular surface protein that functions as a telltale marker for pancreatic cancer. The ability to accurately detect this protein, known as EphA2 may allow it to serve as a signpost that could diagnose even the earliest stages of pancreatic cancer.
"Pancreatic cancer is one type of cancer we desperately need an early blood biomarker for," Hu says. Currently, the only cure for pancreatic cancer remains surgical removal of diseased tissue but in many cases, this is not feasible due to the degree of cancer spread at the time of diagnosis. "Other technology has been used for detection, but it doesnt work very well because of the nature of this cancer. Its really hard to capture an early diagnostic signal when there are no symptoms. Its not like breast cancer, where you may feel pain and you can easily check for an abnormal growth."
This research now demonstrates that a platform that uses the interaction between two different nanoparticles to detect tumor-associated EVs can keenly discriminate between blood samples from patients with pancreatic cancer, pancreatitis a disease that can share symptoms with pancreatic cancer and healthy subjects. Further, this technique may ultimately be useful for the rapid and sensitive detection of a range of diseases, based on their unique EV signatures.
Vesicles in focus
EVs are released by both eukaryotic cells (including human cells) and prokaryotic cells, (like bacterial cells, which lack a nucleus or other membrane-bound components). EVs resemble miniature versions of the cells which produce them, though they lack much of the cells complex machinery.
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