Vesiclemia: counting on extracellular vesicles for glioblastoma patients

Abstract

Although rare, glioblastoma is a devastating tumor of the central nervous system characterized by a poor survival and an extremely dark prognosis, making its diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring highly challenging. Numerous studies have highlighted extracellular vesicles (EVs) as key players of tumor growth, invasiveness, and resistance, as they carry oncogenic material. Moreover, EVs have been shown to communicate locally in a paracrine way but also at remote throughout the organism. Indeed, recent reports demonstrated the presence of brain tumor-derived EVs into body fluids such as plasma and cerebrospinal fluid. Fluid-associated EVs have indeed been suspected to reflect quantitative and qualitative information about the status and fate of the tumor and can potentially act as a resource for noninvasive biomarkers that might assist in diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of glioblastoma patients. Here, we coined the name vesiclemia to define the concentration of plasmatic EVs, an intuitive term to be directly transposed in the clinical jargon.