Recently, Professor Lin Duo and Professor Feng Shangyuan's team from College of Photonic and Electronic Engineering employed the surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) combined with proteomics to profile the characteristic spectral patterns of exosomes secreted from self-established nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC) radioresistance cells for the first time and revealed specific variations of proteins expression during radioresistance formation, including LDH, COL7A1, and COL1A2. Bioinformatic analysis shows that COL1A2 is negatively associated with DNA repair scores and DNA repair-related genes with an unfavorable prognosis in NPC. Furthermore, by extracting and analyzing exosome spectrum data with deep learning algorithms, an effective diagnostic model was generated to discriminate between radiotherapy-sensitive and radiotherapy-resistant exosomes with an accuracy of 92.4%. The work demonstrates the promising potential of exosomes as a novel biomarker for predicting the radioresistance and develops a rapid and sensitive liquid biopsy method that might provide a personalized and precise strategy for clinical NPC treatment.
The work, titled “Profiling of Tumor Cell-delivered Exosome by Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy-based Biosensor for Evaluation of Nasopharyngeal Cancer Radioresistance”, was published in the international journal Advanced Healthcare Materials (SCI District 1 Top). FNU is the first organization of the paper, with Wu Qiong, a PhD candidate of FNU, as the first author, and Professor Feng Shangyuan oversaw the research. The corresponding authors are Professor Lin Duo of FNU, Professor Chen Chuanben and Professor Qiu Sufang of Fujian Cancer Hospital. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Health Foundation for Young and Middle-aged Scientists of Fujian Province and the Baochen Plan High-end Talent Program of FNU and so on.
Paper link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adhm.202202482
(Translated by Chen Wenjia/ Reviewed by Xie Xiujuan)