Nanostructures and Nanotechnologies for the Detection of Extracellular Vesicle

Abstract

characterization, [1] liquid biopsy analyzes the biomarkers in various body fluids, predominantly the blood, enables minimally invasive, dynamic, and integral molecular analysis of tumors and the detection of minimal residual diseases, provides important information for the early diagnosis, prognostication, and the monitoring of tumor progression and treatment response, and would ultimately facilitate precision medicine and personalized cancer management. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are emerging liquid biopsies that can provide comprehensive molecular information at the level of DNA, RNA, and protein, allowing for the multicomponent analysis of cancers. The detection and molecular analysis of EVs are challenging due to their small size, and the difficulties to purify them from the multicomponent serum or plasma samples. Nanomaterials, nanostructures, and nanotechnologies have shown their significant advantages in the high-purity isolation and the high-sensitive and high-specific detection of EVs. Nanotechnology-based liquid biopsy holds great potential as companion or surrogate of tissue biopsy in the clinical practice.Currently, some businesses have built a product pipeline and service platforms around their unique ability of using EVs to identify biomarkers for disease surveillance and diagnosis. ExoDx Prostate IntelliScore (EPI) from Exosome Diagnostics (ExosomeDX) [2] has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the diagnosis of prostate cancer, and ExoDX Lung (ALK), a biopsy product for the analysis of EVsderived RNA from blood samples, has been approved as a clinical assessment tool for gene mutation-associated nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Recently, by deriving differentiated detection parameters, a Nanoparticle EXOsome Sensing (NEXOS) technology was shown to detect sEVs ultrasensitively and multidimensionally, [3] leading to a pilot study of liquid biopsy in liver cancer supported by Roche Diagnostics. Therefore, developing diagnostic strategies based on EV capture, detection, and analysis is of paramount importance to increase the effectiveness of cancer diagnosis.In this review, we focus on the development of nanomaterials, nanostructures, and nanotechniques for the detection and molecular characterization of EVs. The advantages of nanotechnologies in enhancing the capture efficiency, sensitivity, and specificity, and the challenges and opportunities of the nanotechnology-based liquid biopsy for the routine clinical practice are discussed.Liquid biopsy has been taken as a minimally invasive examination and a promising surrogate to the clinically applied tissue-based test for the diagnosis and molecular analysis of cancer. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) carry complex molecular information from the tumor, allowing for the multicomponent analysis of cancer and would be beneficial to personalized medicine. In this review, the advanced nanomaterials and nanotechniques for the detection and molecular profiling of EVs, highlight the advantages of nanotechnology in the high-purity iso...

Liquid Biopsy in the Clinical Management of Cancers

“…Personalized medicine has benefited tremendously from liquid biopsy, enabling the identification of tumor-specific biomarkers that are used to optimize treatment regimens and monitor therapeutic outcomes [37,101]. The use of liquid biopsy has enabled accurate prediction, monitoring, and rational selection of appropriate therapies for individual patients by analyzing ctDNA and CTCs as well [150,151]. Aside from this, liquid biopsy has also been demonstrated to have promise in guiding therapeutic decisions for many types of cancer, including lung cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer by providing real-time molecular information that is useful in guiding treatment choices and evaluating response to treatment.…”