Cristina Bajo-Santos
PhD candidate, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia
She is currently a PhD candidate at University of Latvia. Prior to that, she studied BSc + MSc in Biology at University of Salamanca, Spain and later on she obtained her master by research in Biomedicine at University of Edinburgh, UK. She is currently studying the EV RNA content and its implications as potential biomarkers for Prostate Cancer diagnosis and monitoring.
Plasma and Urinary Extracellular Vesicles as a Source of RNA Biomarkers in
Liquid Biopsies of Prostate Cancer
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are released by virtually all cell types in the body and are present in various biofluids. Molecular cargo of EVs at least partially reflects the molecular composition of their cell of origin, however, what proportion of plasma and urinary EVs are derived from tumor tissue and to what extent their RNA cargo reflect the RNA content of cancer cells is unknown. In our study we characterized and compared the RNA cargo of plasma and urinary EVs collected before and after radical prostatectomy, and matched tumor and normal prostate tissues of prostate cancer (PCa) patients. We performed RNAseq, selected candidates through differential expression analysis and validated the results by ddPCR. Our study demonstrated that urine is significantly enriched with PC-derived RNAs as compared to plasma and suggested that mRNA fragments are the most abundant RNA biotype in EVs with a potential relevance for PCa detection and monitoring.
