Seminar

Integrative Analysis of Liquid Biopsies as a powerful source of low-invasive biomarkers for cancer, metabolic and neurological diseases

Juan M. Falcón, PhD

Liquid biopsies contain many components that are valuable for biomarker discovery. Among these components we could find extracellular vesicles as well as free metabolites and bacteria that depending on the type of biopsy and the status of the organism could vary. By integrating and combining data obtained from proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and metagenomics we have identified candidate biomarkers and altered metabolic pathways as diagnostic and therapeutic targets of different cancers, and metabolic and neurological diseases. Remarkably, all cell-types of the organism secrete extracellular vesicles that by themselves also concentrate proteins, nucleic acids, lipids and metabolites that can play an active role in the development and progression of certain diseases. Since 2006, our group study these vesicles at several levels; 1) improving / developing methods to isolate and characterize them, 2) using them as platform to identify low-invasive biomarkers for several diseases, 3) using them to develop therapeutics tools, and 4) unraveling their function in metabolism. Our work has contributed to establish the exosomes as active metabolic players that could affect the progression of disease, and also as a good biological source to identify low-invasive markers in different clinical settings.