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Abstract
Of Ovarian Cancer and Extracellular Vesicles
Ovarian cancer (OC) is the deadliest of all gynecological malignancies worldwide due to lack of symptoms and rapid development of metastases and chemoresistance. Many OC patients suffer from ascites. This pathological accumulation of fluid in peritoneum is tightly interconnected with dissemination of the tumor and thus is a challenge for clinicians and a sign of a poor prognosis for the patient. Nevertheless, it can be exploited as a relatively easily accessible and undervalued source of a patient’s primary tumor material, including the respective tumor microenvironment (TME) in a liquid form. Ascites is a complex milieu consisting of cells (malignant and non-malignant), soluble factors and also extracellular vesicles (EVs).
EVs are small membrane-bound particles that convey proteins, lipids and nucleic acids between cells and their cargo reflects the cell of origin. EVs play important role in cancerogenesis and hold great promise as disease biomarkers and drug delivery systems. However, small size and polydispersity of EVs bring various challenges to their isolation and characterization, limits our understanding of EV biology and delays their clinical use.
This lecture will provide overview of our research topics and will show, how analyses of ascitic cells and EVs can help in unravelling the underlying molecular principles of disease progression and how ascites can serve as new source of diagnostic/screening/prognostic biomarkers of OC and clinically relevant disease models.
