Pilot Study With the Aim to Quantify a Stress Protein in the Blood and in the Urine for Early Diagnosis of Malgnant Solid Tumors

Recent studies shows that extracellular vesicles (named "exosomes") released by cancer cells exhibit at their membrane the stress protein HSP70, contrary to exosomes released by normal cells. These exosomes ("HSP70-exosomes") have a very important role in intercellular communication and have specific biological functions that can promote tumor progression. They are found in the different biological fluids such as blood and urine.

We have developed a protocol able to isolate exosomes in blood and urine. We also demonstrated that only exosomes derived from cancer cell have HSP70 at their membrane. Those results strongly suggest that we can only identify exosomes with HSP70 at the membrane in patients with cancer.

Detection of HSP70-exosomes in the diagnosis of patients is a promising pathway of research. Because a cancer cell can releases a large amount of exosomes (several billion) and since its appearance, our approach will allow to earlier detect cancer with respect to the use of imaging and circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which remains a rare event (about one CTC of 1 billion cells).

The aim of this study is to demonstrate that HSP70-exosomes could be used for early diagnosis of patients with malignant solid tumor. In order to demonstrate this, the objective of the study is to study blood and urine samples from 60 subjects with a malignant tumor and 20 healthy subjects (witness).