Kidney Cancer and Potential Use of Urinary Extracellular Vesicles

Oncol Rev. 2024 May 23:18:1410450. doi: 10.3389/or.2024.1410450. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Kidney cancer is the 14th most common cancer globally. The 5-year relative survival rate of kidney cancer at a localized stage is 92.9% and it declines to 17.4% in metastatic stage. Currently, the most accurate method of its diagnosis is tissue biopsy. However, the invasive and costly nature of biopsies makes it undesirable in many patients. Therefore, novel biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis should be explored. Urinary extracellular vesicles (uEVs) are small vesicles (50-200 nm) in urine carrying nucleic acids, proteins and lipids as their cargos. These uEVs' cargos can provide non-invasive alternative to monitor kidney health. In this review, we have summarized recent studies investigating potential use of uEVs' cargos as biomarkers in kidney cancer for diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic intervention.

Keywords: biomarker; exosome; extracellular vesicle; kidney cancer; renal cell carcinoma; urine.

Publication types

  • Review

Grants and funding

The authors declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was supported by the Bio and Medical Technology Development Program (2019M3E5D3073092) and the Basic Science Research Program (NRF-2021R1A2C3012633 and MSIT, RS-2023-00219563) of the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT, and the Soonchunhyang University Research Fund.