Next-generation sequencing of circulating exosomal RNA from metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer patients.

233 Background: PCa has proven to be an extraordinarily complex disease, with both genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity. Exosomes are membranous nano-sized (50-100nm) vesicles derived from both normal and tumor cells, and function in cell-to-cell communication. These vesicles and their nucleic acid cargo may serve as a peripheral biomarker for genetic risk assessment of PCa prognosis and therapeutic response. The goal of this study was to characterize exosome derived RNA (exoRNA) isolated from blood of metastatic CRPC patients. Methods: Blood samples from 18 consented clinically annotated mCRPC patients and 1 normal control; exosomes were isolated with ultracentrifugation and exoRNA extracted. Following library prep, paired-end sequencing was performed using Illumina Hi-Seq 2000. A bioinformatics pipeline was used for data pre-possessing including alignment, duplicate removal, normalization and variant calling. Visualization and differential analyses were performed with SNP & Variation Suite v8.x. Results...