Description

One of the challenges of current research in prostate cancer is to improve the differential non-invasive diagnosis of prostate cancer (PCa) and benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH). Extracellular vesicles (EV) are emerging structures with promising properties for intercellular communication. In addition, the characterization of EV in biofluids is an attractive source of non-invasive diagnostic, prognostic and predictive biomarkers. Here we show that urinary EV (uEV) from prostate cancer patients exhibit genuine and differential physical and biological properties. Importantly, transcriptomics characterization of uEVs led us to define the decreased abundance of Cadherin 3, type 1 (CDH3) transcript in uEV from PCa patients. Tissue and cell line analysis strongly suggested that the status of CDH3 in uEVs is a distal reflection of changes in the expression of this cadherin in the prostate tumor. Our results reveal that uEVs could represent a non-invasive tool to inform about the molecular alterations in prostate cancer.

Publication Title

Transcriptomic profiling of urine extracellular vesicles reveals alterations of CDH3 in prostate cancer.

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