Doctoral Candidate University of Florida Gainesville, Florida
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have gained significant attention in the field of extracellular communication, holding promise as intercellular messengers and diagnostic biomarkers. However, the challenges in isolating and purifying EVs from complex biological samples have hindered their widespread utility. This study presents a novel EV isolation strategy leveraging bioinformatics, utilizing the pH-low insertion peptide (pHLIP) to capture and release EVs under controlled conditions. The pHLIP-magnetic bead approach was developed to achieve efficient EV isolation, addressing the persistent issue of EV isolation method comparability. EVs from human plasma were isolated and characterized using various techniques, offering insights into the proposed isolation method's efficacy. A data science-driven statistical metric integrating multiple characterizations was applied to enable direct comparisons between different isolation methods. Next generation sequencing was applied to examine how the observed RNA-population differences across isolated EVs may lead researchers to different conclusions. This research contributes to the advancement of reliable and rigorous EV isolation methods and their potential contribution to expanding the pancreatic cancer biomarker space.
Learning Objectives:
Upon completion, participant will be able to apply the strategy I present to develop an efficient carrier for extracellular vesicles from the other cell sources for any kind of diseases.
Upon completion, participant will be able to understand the rigor required to observe and conclude about extracellular vesicle therapeutic efficacy
Upon completion, participant will be able to understand how to discover extracellular vesicle biomarkers related to pancreatic cancer.