Novel potential extracellular vesicle biomarkers obtained through liquid biopsy to translate into tumor clinical routine

The aim of the Ph.D. project has been focused on uncovering through a blood-based liquid biopsy (LB) approach novel extracellular vesicle biomarkers to translate into clinical routine as quicker, innovative and sensitive tools. The approach here proposed has been tested in two different experimental settings, displaying feasibility and robustness. Firstly, it has shown to discriminate prostate tumour patients from those ones affected by hyperplasia in order to do early diagnosis and, thereby, address patients towards different medical care strategies. Secondly, regarding patient management in the follow-up phase, not only it has pinpointed those individuals who will suffer for colorectal cancer recurrence, but it has also discriminated patients for their mismatch repair system status, selecting best candidates for the immunotherapy application. The novelty of this approach consists in usage extracellular vesicles, particularly proteins they deliver, as novel information sources and alternative to other LB tools (e.g. CTCs and ctDNA), which have displayed several practical disadvantages and a suboptimal robustness. In addition, an emerging imaging technology, direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM), used only for research so far, has been employed, suggesting and encouraging its translatability in clinic as well. Lastly the low volume of starting required samples makes such an approach attractive, mainly in order to avoid repeated sampling which would cause patients’ discomfort.