Translational Medicine
Open Access
ISSN: 2161-1025
ISSN: 2161-1025
Winston Patrick Kuo
Accepted Abstracts: Transl Med
Extracellular vesicles (EVs), including exosomes and microvesicles, have emerged as a promising minimally invasive novel source of material for molecular diagnostics. Within the past 5 years, it has been shown that EVs carry a variety of biomacromolecules including mRNA, microRNA (miRNA) and other non-coding RNAs, providing an incentive to focus research and development efforts on the potential clinical utility of EVs for the purpose of disease detection and monitoring therapeutic responses. EVs are multifunctional entities that appear to play an active role in many significant biological processes, such as regulation of immune response, antigen presentation, transfer of bioactive molecules between cells and tissues, and transfer of viruses and prions. Innovative and more efficient means of nucleic acid profiling are needed to facilitate investigations into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of EV function, and to establish their potential as useful clinical biomarkers and potential therapeutic tools. Although EVs can be easily identified and collected from biological fluids, further research and proper validation is needed in order for them to be useful in the clinical setting. Research on tumor-derived EVs from prostate cancer and its clinical utility will be presented.
Winston Patrick Kuo is currently on the Scientific Advisory Board of Exosomics, Siena, Italy and HansaBioMed, Tallin, Estonia, both exosome-based commercial entities, the former focused on clinical diagnostics and the later, life science products. He is also Editor in Chief of the journal, Exosomes and Microvesicles and former consultant for Exosome Diagnostics. He was Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology at Harvard School of Dental Medicine and Director and Founder of the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science ? Laboratory for Innovative Translational Technologies at Harvard Medical School. He received his DDS from Columbia University and received his DMSc in Oral Biology, with a focus on computational biology from Harvard University and his SM in Medical Informatics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Division of Health Sciences and Technology.