An Argument to Examine Exosomal Survivin Splice Variant Expression and Patient Survival in Pancreatic Cancer

Janviere Kabagwira and Nathan R. Wall

Department of Basic Sciences, Division of Biochemistry, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California 92350, USA

^*Correspondance to: Nathan R. Wall 

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Abstract:

Important to pancreatic cancer (PCa) diagnosis and management is to determine an optimal combination of clinical indicators or biomarkers that could detect tumors early with high specificity/ sensitivity and with limited invasiveness. In spite of the availability of a plethora of gene products considered as promising PCa biomarkers, it is recognized that their combined use with the available clinical information is still insufficient for early diagnosis and for guiding individualized therapeutic interventions and predicting outcomes [1]. Their main limitation is that they require invasive procedures such as biopsies. However, there is growing interest in using proteomics approaches to identify tumor-derived serum microvesicles called exosomes and their content, as serological biomarkers [2-8]. This interest stems from the notion that these blood components are considered “sensors” of molecular events associated with tumorigenesis [5,9,10]. One such target that may prove useful in early detection from PCa patient serum or plasma is the newly recognized exosomal protein Survivin [11] and its alternative splice variants. Validation that serum exosomes contain a specific panel of survivin splice variants may provide not only a cancer-specific marker of cancer but a means to identify disease in a non-invasive manner.

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Cite the Article:

Kabagwira J, Wall NR. An Argument to Examine Exosomal Survivin Splice Variant Expression and Patient Survival in Pancreatic Cancer. Clin Oncol. 2017; 2: 1310.