Single-Extracellular Vesicle Analysis (sEVA) to Detect Early Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a leading cause of cancer death with only one in five patients presenting with surgically resectable, potentially curable disease. Various extracellular vesicle (EV)-based analyses are being explored as one category of “liquid biopsies” to complement imaging modalities as a strategy to identify more patients with localized disease. However, PDAC heterogeneity, low levels of available biomarker-positive EVs, and uncertainty related to biomarker selection have resulted in suboptimal performance of bulk EV analyses in patients.

A recent study by Ferguson et al. makes a compelling argument for the use of single-EV analysis (sEVA) to discover early PDAC (1). The authors first examined 11 model cell lines to assess the presence of potential biomarkers and found that only ~40% of EVs were positive for mutated KRAS or p53 proteins expressed in the parental lines. This number dropped precipitously (<0.1% of EVs) when they looked at proven stage 1 PDAC patient samples. Impressively, the sEVA analytic platform they describe was successful in visualizing mutated biomarker-positive EVs in 15 of these 16 patients. The researchers then used modeling to conclude that sEVA could be sensitive to tumor volumes of ~0.1 cm³, which is below the resolution of current imaging techniques. Though challenges remain, this exciting work establishes sEVA as a promising approach to augment imaging for early cancer detection.

GeneTex offers an extensive line of well-validated antibodies for cancer biology research, including a constantly growing catalog of recombinant monoclonal antibodies. One of these new recombinant antibodies is the RAS (G12D Mutant) antibody [HL10] (GTX635362) cited in the Ferguson et al. paper described above (see images below). This antibody was required to meet stringent specificity criteria set by the study’s authors. For more information about GeneTex products, please go to www.genetex.com.