Emanuele Cocucci
Ohio State University, OH·Biology
Could a simple blood test detect pancreatic cancer early? Cells constantly release extracellular vesicles (EVs), tiny membrane-wrapped packages that travel through blood and other body fluids and appear to carry messages between cells.
- Fields
Biology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
extracellular vesicles
exosomes
tetraspanin
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Nov 2027
What they work on
- Perform an unbiased calibration of how the number of circulating extracellular vesicles relates to their cells of origin, using enCD63, an engineered version of the vesicle protein CD63, expressed in specific cells of genetically engineered mice.
- Define how much individual healthy tissues contribute to the pool of extracellular vesicles in the blood of healthy mice, by restricting enCD63 labeling to chosen tissues.
- Assess the sensitivity and specificity of extracellular vesicles for detecting pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma by tracking enCD63-labeled tumor vesicles in mouse models as cancer develops.
More about the research
Cancer cells release far more EVs than normal cells, and the contents of an EV reflect the cell that made it. This makes EVs promising as non-invasive biomarkers for diagnosing cancer, tracking its progress and judging how well treatment is working. However, results have been hard to reproduce. Three problems stand in the way. No unbiased method exists to test how small a cancer EVs can detect. Researchers do not know how much healthy tissues contribute to the EVs in blood. No one has systematically tracked cancer-derived EVs as a tumor develops.
Why it matters
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma has a low survival rate, partly because there are no sensitive and specific tests to detect it. Rigorously measuring how well blood-borne extracellular vesicles reveal tumors could lead to standardized EV biomarker methods. These methods may eventually support non-invasive tests for detecting, staging and monitoring cancer.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Manuel Ascano
Vanderbilt University, TN·Biochemistry
Identify RNA–protein complexes sorted into extracellular vesicles using EV-CLASP, which crosslinks 4SU-labeled RNAs to their binding proteins, combined with biotin-dependent proximity labeling.
Wantong Yao
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Define the molecular pathways through which a newly identified stress-response regulator helps pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) cells survive nutrient shortage, low oxygen and oxidative stress, and evade the immune system.
Shi-He Liu
University of Toledo, OH·Biomedical Engineering
Evaluate whether exosomes displaying both the tumor-homing peptide RGD and the CD47 "don't eat me" peptide on surface protein CD9 (ExoSmart) target pancreatic cancer, using stroma-rich 3D human tumor spheroids in vitro and in vivo.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.