Sdps-31 extracellular vesicles and their cargo as a pharmacodynamic reporter in glioblastoma

Abstract Glioblastoma (GBM) is a lethal brain tumor with limited treatment options, due in part to the low blood-brain-barrier (BBB) penetrance of many anti-cancer compounds. Development of a non-invasive test that can measure drug delivery and target engagement in GBM represents an opportunity to enhance knowledge during early phase clinical trials of a new compound’s pharmacological suitability and potential efficacy. We present here data supporting that the cargo within extracellular vesicles (EV) can potentially serve as a liquid biopsy that reports on the pharmacodynamics of GBM therapeutics. We treated short-term cell cultures established from four patient-derived xenografts with vehicle, temozolomide, MLN4924, or arsenic trioxide. EVs were isolated from culture supernatants using size exclusion chromatography and then analyzed by RNA sequencing and mass spectrometry (proteomics) to characterize and compare cargo profiles for each condition. We found that depending on treatment, there were shared alterations in EV cargo between models in the expression of long non-coding RNAs, genes that are overrepresented in biological processes such as cytoplasmic translation and cellular macromolecule biosynthesis, and circular RNAs. Mass spectrometry of protein cargo further demonstrated both upregulated and downregulated peptide abundances with treatment compared to vehicle. Thus, our preliminary results indicate that EV cargo post-treatment may be a novel pharmacodynamic reporter in GBM. To allow for the selective interrogation of patient GBM-derived EVs, we have simultaneously pursued the identification of biomarkers to allow for immunoprecipitation of EVs from patient biofluids. Potential biomarkers, including PTPRZ1, B7H3, and IL13RA2, were screened across isolated EVs from both pre-clinical and clinical patient samples. Future efforts are focused on evaluating immunoprecipitated GBM-EVs from longitudinally collected patient biofluids. Overall, we anticipate that the results of this study will lead to development of a clinical test that reflects BBB penetration and tumor response, which will likely aid in novel drug development efforts.