What can be learned from what cells dispose of? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Extracellular vesicles are membrane bound packages cells use to jettison materials from inside the cell, a sort of trash can. Johns Hopkins genetic medicine expert Vasiliki Machairaki has shown in a new study that these vesicles may be a means to diagnose and stage Alzheimer’s disease.

Machairaki: Extracellular vesicles are important because extracellular vesicles as I mentioned they are separated in every single cell type of the human body. You can isolate extracellular vesicles from the blood. Some of these extracellular vesicles are coming from the brain. Being able to isolate this brain specific extracellular vesicles from the peripheral blood we use it as what we call a liquid biopsy.    :27

Machairaki and colleagues used brain organoids derived from blood cells from individual patients to study the vesicles, which may also be used to assess medication effectiveness. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.