Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Science - Department of Biotechnology

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare, but aggressive entity of breast carcinoma associated with rapid dermal lymphatic invasion in young females. It is either poorly or misdiagnosed as mastitis due to the absence of a distinct lump. Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) (20-200nm) circulating in liquid biopsies are a novel class of minimally invasive diagnostic alternatives to invasive tissue biopsies. In the cancer microenvironment, they modulate cancer progression via shuttling their encapsulated cargo including microRNAs (miRNAs) into recipient cells to either trigger signaling or induce malignant transformation of targeted cells. While small non-coding regulatory miRNAs are already known cancer biomarkers, exosomal miRNAs serve as a novel class of diagnostic biomarkers. The present study mainly aimed to evaluate the expression levels of sEV- derived miRNAs relevant to IBC pathogenesis. This prospective case-control study included 77 females; 57 were diagnosed with breast cancer (34 non-IBC and 23 IBC), while 20 were healthy volunteers. All have signed an informed consent to be enrolled in this investigation. Patients included were neither pregnant nor issued with bloodborne or autoimmune disease, while healthy subjects had no oncologic history. Plasma sEVs less than 200 nm were isolated using modified cost-effective polyethylene glycol (PEG)-based precipitation method and compared to standard methods, namely ultracentrifugation, and a commercial kit. The successful isolation was verified by dynamic light scattering (DLS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), western blot (WB), and dot blot (DB)

Issued also as CD