EvIPqPCR, Target Circulating Tumorous Extracellular Vesicles for Detection of Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer patients predominantly present withadvanceddisease at diagnosis, contributing to its high mortality. A noninvasive,fast screening method to detect this disease is an unmet need. Tumor-derivedextracellular vesicles (tdEVs) bearing information from parental cellshave emerged as a promising cancer diagnostic biomarker. However,most tdEV-based assays have impractical sample volumes and time-consuming,complex, and costly techniques. To overcome these limitations, wedeveloped a novel diagnostic method for pancreatic cancer screening.Our approach utilizes the mitochondrial DNA to nuclear DNA ratio ofEVs as a collective cell-specific characteristic. We introduce EvIPqPCR,a fast method that combines immunoprecipitation (IP) and qPCR quantificationto detect tumor-derived EVs directly from serum. Importantly, ourmethod employs DNA isolation-free and duplexing probes for qPCR, savingat least 3 h. This technique has the potential to serve as a translationalassay for cancer screening with a weak correlation to prognosis biomarkersand sufficient discriminatory power among healthy controls, pancreatitis,and pancreatic cancer cases.

Automated summary

Pancreatic cancer patients often have advanced disease at diagnosis, leading to high mortality rates. Currently, there is a lack of noninvasive and fast screening methods to detect this disease. Tumor-derived extracellular vesicles (tdEVs) carrying information from parent cells have emerged as a promising cancer diagnostic biomarker. However, most tdEV-based assays have practical limitations. To overcome these challenges, a novel diagnostic method called EvIPqPCR was developed, which combines immunoprecipitation (IP) and qPCR quantification to directly detect tumor-derived EVs from serum. This technique has the potential to be a translational assay for cancer screening with weak correlation to prognosis biomarkers and sufficient discriminatory power among different groups.