Monday, 10 October 2022: 14:20
Room 312 (The Hilton Atlanta)
Analyzing circulating extracellular vesicles (EVs) or exosome promises to improve cancer diagnostics and enable serial patient monitoring during therapy. Establishing clinical EV tests, however, faces practical challenges: complex and lengthy sample workup; limited throughput and sensitivity of conventional assays; high equipment or test costs; and lack of clinically validated markers. In this presentation, we report key advances toward clinical EV analyses: i) development of a high-throughput assay strategy, HiMEX (high-throughput magneto-electrochemical exosome), and ii) assessment of EVs as a biomarker of colorectal cancer (CRC). HiMEX integrates magnetic capture with electrochemical detection within a single platform; we enrich cancer-specific EVs directly from plasma samples and profile their protein expression. This approach renders the assay fast (<1 hour) and scalable; we implemented a compact assay system for parallel detection (96-well format). Applying HiMEX, we profiled circulating EVs in clinical samples EVs were found to carry key protein signatures of tumor tissues, and by using a combination of markers, we achieved high diagnostic accuracies (>95%). Preoperative EV tests further showed this method’s prognostic potential for categorizing patients into high- and low-risk groups for 5-year disease-free survival. These outcomes demonstrate HiMEX’s clinical utility for timely, informed cancer care.