EvIPqPCR, Target Circulating Tumorous Extracellular Vesicles for Detection of Pancreatic Cancer

Anal Chem. 2023 Jul 11;95(27):10353-10361. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.3c01218. Epub 2023 Jun 20.

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer patients predominantly present with advanced disease at diagnosis, contributing to its high mortality. A noninvasive, fast screening method to detect this disease is an unmet need. Tumor-derived extracellular vesicles (tdEVs) bearing information from parental cells have emerged as a promising cancer diagnostic biomarker. However, most tdEV-based assays have impractical sample volumes and time-consuming, complex, and costly techniques. To overcome these limitations, we developed a novel diagnostic method for pancreatic cancer screening. Our approach utilizes the mitochondrial DNA to nuclear DNA ratio of EVs as a collective cell-specific characteristic. We introduce EvIPqPCR, a fast method that combines immunoprecipitation (IP) and qPCR quantification to detect tumor-derived EVs directly from serum. Importantly, our method employs DNA isolation-free and duplexing probes for qPCR, saving at least 3 h. This technique has the potential to serve as a translational assay for cancer screening with a weak correlation to prognosis biomarkers and sufficient discriminatory power among healthy controls, pancreatitis, and pancreatic cancer cases.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Biomarkers, Tumor
  • Cell Line, Tumor
  • Extracellular Vesicles*
  • Humans
  • Pancreatic Neoplasms* / diagnosis

Substances

  • Biomarkers, Tumor