Plasmatic exosome number and size distinguish prostate cancer patients from healthy individuals: a prospective clinical study

There is a urgent need for valuable strategy in early and less invasive diagnosis for cancer. Preliminary data have shown that the plasmatic levels of exosomes increase in cancer condition. This study investigates the relevance of plasmatic levels and size distribution of exosomes in 42 individuals with no signs of urological disease (CTR) as compared to 65 prostate cancer patients (PCa). It was used Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA), a highly reliable and sensitive method for exosomes characterization and quantification. The relation structure among the NTA-derived parameters was assessed by means of Principal Component Analysis, which allowed detecting the global discriminant power of NTA test in terms of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve and the selection of cut-off thresholds. The results showed that PCa had significantly higher plasmatic levels of exosomes and that the exosomes were smaller in size as compared to the CTR; the values reached 89% sensitivity and 71% specificity, in distinguishing PCa from CTR. These results propose a new exosome-based non-invasive clinical approach for the clinical follow-up of prostate cancer undergoing surgical treatment; in addition this method may be developed as a new screening test for prostate cancer’s early diagnosis. While this clinical study was performed in prostate cancer, it may represent a proof of concept extendable to virtually all cancers, as it is suggested by both pre-clinical evidence and clinical data obtained with different technical approaches.