The Role of Extracellular Vesicles in Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy 2.0

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is a continuation of our previous Special Issue titled “The Role of Exosomes in Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy”. Due to the extensive research in recent years, small extracellular vesicles (sEVs), also known as exosomes, are now considered major contributors to intercellular communication in health and disease. Small extracellular vesicles carry a complex cargo composition consisting of proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids, and it has been shown that components of sEVs are biologically active and induce effects in recipient cells. These characteristics of sEVs motivated researchers worldwide to further explore their biology under physiological as well as pathophysiological conditions, and especially tumor-cell-derived sEVs have been extensively studied. Research shows that tumor-cell-derived sEVs promote tumor progression by local and systemic effects, and functionally contribute to malignant processes such as metastasis, immunosuppression, angiogenesis, and drug resistance. Besides their functional effects in the tumor microenvironment, sEVs have been shown to serve as attractive biomarkers or could even be utilized for sEV-based nanotherapeutic approaches.

The important versatile roles of sEVs in cancer motivated us to serve as Guest Editors of this Special Issue and create a collection of articles fully dedicated to sEV biology. We aim to focus this Special Issue on the molecular aspects of sEVs by shifting the main emphasis on the use of sEVs for cancer diagnosis as well as using sEVs as cancer therapeutics. We welcome any articles investigating sEVs as cancer biomarkers, nanotherapeutics or even how sEVs promote drug resistance in cancer.

We hope that your contribution to this Special Issue will be a positive experience for you and for the sEV research community. We invite you to contribute your research to this Special Issue on “The Role of Extracellular Vesicles in Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy 2.0”.

Dr. Nils Ludwig
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• extracellular vesicles
• exosomes
• intercellular communication
• liquid biopsy
• cancer therapeutics
• nanotherapeutics

• The Role of Exosomes in Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy in International Journal of Molecular Sciences (9 articles)