Extracellular Vesicle Profiling and Their Use as Potential Disease Specific Biomarker

Abstract

Cell-derived vesicles in particular extracellular vesicles (EVs) such as microparticles (MPs) and microvesicles besides exosomes are raising more and more attention as a novel and unique approach to detect diseases. It has recently become apparent that disease specific MP signatures or profiles might be beneficial to differentiate chronic liver diseases such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and chronic hepatitis C, to monitor their progression or possibly to assess treatment outcome. Therefore EVs might serve as a novel inexpensive and minimally invasive method to screen risk patients for the outbreak of a disease even before the initial symptoms, to follow up treatment complications and disease relapse. The purpose of the current review is to summarize already published EVs signatures for a limited number of exemplary diseases and to discuss their possible impact. Additionally, it will be discussed if the combination of EV profiling and miRNA profiling could be a future joint tool for the purpose of detecting cancer and from far larger interest to ultimately distinguish among various tumor entities. EVs might increase the chance of early detection of chronic diseases or cancers especially if applied as part of yearly health screenings in the future.

Current and future biomarkers in allergic asthma

“…EMVs contain potentially disease-associated molecules, including microRNAs and lipid mediators that have been suggested as future biomarkers for a variety of diseases (190). In the last decade, potential pathological roles of exosomes in airway inflammation have been suggested by work showing the capacity of these vesicles to carry pro-inflammatory mediators (191,192).…”

Regulation of chronic inflammatory and immune processes by extracellular vesicles

“…For example, it was determined via flow cytometry that sera from patients with chronic hepatitis C have elevated levels of EVs from CD4 + and CD8 + T cells, whereas patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis have elevated levels of EVs from iNKT cells and CD14 + macrophages/monocytes. The levels of these EVs in the sera correlated with disease severity and are thus a viable diagnostic tool for the assessment of these liver inflammatory diseases (100,101). Furthermore, the RNA profile of urine EVs from patients with SLE suggests that this approach could be used to determine the extent of kidney damage from lupus nephritis, which causes SLE-related morbidity and mortality (102,103).…”

Tissue-specific exosome biomarkers for noninvasively monitoring immunologic rejection of transplanted tissue

“…Several groups have reported on whole plasma/bodily fluid profiling of free nucleic acids and proteins as biomarker platforms for monitoring rejection, especially in the context of renal transplantation (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17). But diagnostic accuracy remains a critical problem, as free nucleic acids and proteins are typically nonspecific and unstable in circulation, requiring a high steady state for reliable quantitation.…”