Rewiring cell communication to treat melanoma
Source: Drug Discovery News, September 2023
When Susanne Gabrielsson first learned about exosomes, her eyes widened. In 1999, she’d just started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Curie Institute in Paris. Gabrielsson, an immunologist now at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, thumbed through paper after paper describing which types of cells release these tiny blobs of information.
“I realized that since they were released from many cells, they probably would be released from all cells,” she said. “And that they would be a new means of communication.”
In the early 1980s, biologists pointed the nascent electron microscope at red blood cells, hoping to understand how they mature (1). They made a startling discovery: The cells ejected bits of material enveloped in small membranes. Later, a different team of biochemists working independently called them “exosomes.”