Exosomes and ectosomes: the ins-and-outs of these extracellular vesicles

19 February 2016
February 19th 2016
Contatti: 

Venue: Edificio Povo 1, via Sommarive nr. 5, Povo (Tn) - Room A208
 At 2:00 p.m.

  • Lorraine O’Driscoll -  Panoz Institute & Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.

Exosomes and ectosomes (collectively termed extracellular vesicles (EVs)) are tiny membrane-surrounded vesicles released from cells. Originally considered as junk, EVs are now proposed to be mini-maps of their cells of origin. In cancer, studies of cell lines, animal models and patients’ specimens have advocated EVs positively as bundles of biomarkers. In parallel, mounting evidence implicates EVs as mechanisms of cell-to-cell communication, transferring undesirable information between cells. Examples include stimulating recipient cell proliferation, motility, invasion; passing on drug-resistance characteristics; inducing endothelial tubule formation/angiogenesis; crossing the blood brain barrier; and attracting cancer cells to secondary sites to form metastasis. This presentation will summarise our comparison of methods for EV isolation and characterisation and detail some of our research in this field.

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