Department of Clinical Pharmacology, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders Medical Centre, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
Cell Mol Life Sci. 2022 Apr 10;79(5):232. doi: 10.1007/s00018-022-04256-8.
Chronic liver diseases represent a burgeoning health problem affecting billions of people worldwide. The insufficient performance of current minimally invasive tools is recognised as a significant barrier to the clinical management of these conditions. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have emerged as a rich source of circulating biomarkers closely linked to pathological processes in originating tissues. Here, we summarise the contribution of EVs to normal liver function and to chronic liver pathologies; and explore the use of circulating EV biomarkers, with a particular focus on techniques to isolate and analyse cell- or tissue-specific EVs. Such approaches present a novel strategy to inform disease status and monitor changes in response to treatment in a minimally invasive manner. Emerging technologies that support the selective isolation and analysis of circulating EVs derived only from hepatic cells, have driven recent advancements in EV-based biomarker platforms for chronic liver diseases and show promise to bring these techniques to clinical settings.
慢性肝脏疾病是一个日益严重的健康问题，影响着全球数十亿人。目前微创工具的性能不足被认为是这些疾病临床管理的一个重大障碍。细胞外囊泡（EVs）已成为与起源组织病理过程密切相关的循环生物标志物的丰富来源。在这里，我们总结了 EVs 对正常肝脏功能和慢性肝脏病理的贡献；并探讨了循环 EV 生物标志物的应用，特别关注分离和分析细胞或组织特异性 EV 的技术。这些方法提供了一种新的策略，可以以微创的方式告知疾病状态，并监测对治疗的反应变化。支持仅从肝细胞中选择性分离和分析循环 EV 的新兴技术推动了基于 EV 的慢性肝脏疾病生物标志物平台的最新进展，并有望将这些技术应用于临床环境。
