Abstract

Cancer-derived Extracellular Vesicles as Early Disease Biomarkers

Andreas Möller, Associate Professor, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

Late diagnosis of cancer is a key cause of the high cancer-associated mortality. However, a most cancer progression occurs ‘silently’, associated with no or diffuse symptoms. A non-invasive test, for example using blood, to determine that an individual has an early stage cancer would provide curative therapeutic options and presents an important unmet clinical needs. In this presentation, I will summarize the research approaches in the area of cancer-derived EVs undertaken by my group. I will discuss novel data on how liquid biopsies based on small amounts of blood can determine the presence of early stage cancer and how this can be potentially applied clinically. In detail, we derived a cancer-specific multi-protein EV marker capable of detecting the presence of 8 cancer types in individuals, including those patients with stage I. Confirming the platform independence of the biomarker, we transferred the test to a SERS-based microfluidics platform, and demonstrate the capacity to distinguish patients with benign and malignant conditions. Overall, our biomarker is capable of detecting early stage cancer in the blood of individuals and has various potential applications in reducing cancer-associated mortality.