Laboratory for Ovarian Cancer and Extracellular Vesicles

Department of Experimental Biology, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University

Group leader: Vendula Hlaváčková Pospíchalová
website:https://www.sci.muni.cz/ofiz/en/pospichalova-lab-2/
email: pospich@sci.muni.cz

Extracellular vesicles in ovarian cancer ascites

Ovarian cancer (OC) ranks among the deadliest cancers in women. Lack of symptoms, rapid metastases and common chemoresistance contribute to unfortunate fate of majority of OC patients, especially those having high-grade serous carcinoma of the ovary, fallopian tube and peritoneum (HGSC), the most common and most aggressive type of OC. Many HGSC patients have excess fluid in the peritoneum called ascites. Ascites is basically a tumor microenvironment (TME) containing various cells, proteins and extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs play an important role in cancerogenesis and hold great promise as disease biomarkers, yet their small size and polydispersity bring various challenges to their isolation and characterization, including method-dependent enrichment of different EV subtypes as well as contaminants.

Our research projects focus on method development in the field, comparison of different isolation methods and especially on proteomic analyses of ascitic EVs and how these can help in unraveling the underlying molecular principles of disease progression and how can ascites serve as a new source of diagnostic/screening/prognostic EV-based biomarkers of HGSC and clinically relevant disease models.