Poster Presentation Australasian Extracellular Vesicles Conference 2018

Exosome evaluation for cancer diagnosis and therapy using Surface-enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) (#75)

Wei Zhang 1 2 , Yuling Wang 1 2
  1. Molecular Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
  2. ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale Biophotonics (CNBP), Sydney, NSW, Australia

            Exosomes are a kind of most important cancer biomarkers. They existed in most of body fluids including blood, urine and saliva, holding great potential to serve as indicators for cancer diagnosis and therapy. As exosomes are very small (30-150 nm) and heterogeneous, it is challenging to detect exosomes using traditional methods due to their limited multiplexing capability or sensitivity. In this contribution, we firstly isolated exosomes from the cell culture media by ultracentrifuge and characterized them by TEM and nanopore. We further proposed a new method to use SERS (Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering) for simultaneously labelling and monitoring of the multiple surface markers on exosomes from pancreatic cancer for early cancer diagnosis. Specifically, magnetic beads functionalized with CD63 antibodies can be used to capture the exosomes. Furthermore, SERS nano-tags made of gold nanoparticles attaching with Raman reporters (5,5′-Dithiobis (2-nitrobenzoic acid, DTNB; 4-Mercaptobenzoic acid, MBA or 2,3,5,6-Tetrafluoro-4-mercaptobenzonic acid, TFMBA) and exosome-specific antibodies (Glypican 1, EpCAM or CD44V6 antibodies) can specifically recognise the target biomarkers on exosomes. With exosomes present, the magnetic beads and SERS nano-tags can form sandwich-type immunocomplex, the SERS signal of which can be detected by Raman reader. While with no exosomes present, no immunocomplex will be formed, thus there will be no or very low SERS signal detected.  With three cell surface biomarkers on exosome, we will profile the expression of the exosome surface biomarkers in response to therapy, further apply this technique for cancer diagnosis and patient health monitoring.