Oral Presentation Australasian Extracellular Vesicles Conference 2020

Trends in Extracellular Vesicle research and their potential as disease biomarkers for neurodegenerative disease (#1)

Andrew Hill 1
  1. La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

The field of Extracellular vesicle (EV) research has exploded in the last decade and as we learn more about their biology, their translation potential into disease therapy and diagnosis is being rapidly developed. One area of research in which EVs play are role are in neurodegenerative diseases which associate with the deposition of misfolded proteins in the brain. These include Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, prion, and Motor Neuron disease. Our group has shown that EV’s contain distinct processed forms of these proteins and that, in the case of prion disease, they contain the transmissible form of the misfolded protein. In addition to their protein content these vesicles have recently been shown to contain genetic material in the form of protein coding (mRNA) and noncoding RNA species. This presentation will discuss some current trends in EV research and outline work in our laboratory in developing EV based biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases.