ABSTRACT
Prostate cancer (PCa) remains the most frequently diagnosed male malignancy in Western countries and the second most common cause of male cancer death in the United States. The relatively elevated PCa incidence and mortality among African American men makes this cancer type a challenging health disparity disease. To increase the chance for successful trea tment, earlier detection and prediction of tumor aggress iveness will be important and need to be resolved. This study demonstrates that small membrane-bound vesicles shed from the tumor called exosomes contain ethnically and tumor-specific biomarkers, and could be exploited for their diagnostic and therapeutic potential.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Center for Health Disparities & Molecular Medicine for supporting this project and the graduate students that it involved. They would also like to thank the Loma Linda Universities Cancer Center & San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Biospecimen Laboratory for providing valued samples for this study. They would also like to thank members of the Wall Laboratory as well as Shahrzad Khosrowpour from Chapman University for careful review of our manuscript.
Declaration of interest
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
The research reported in this publication was supported by NIH awards P20MD006988 and 2R25 GM060507 (CAC & NRW). Funding was also made possible through a National Merit Test Bed (NMTB) award sponsored by the Department of the Army under Cooperative Agreement Number DAMD17-97-2-7016 (NRW).
Supplementary material online
Supplemental Table I