# Exosomal Contents Guided Amino Acids Treatment for Pancreatic Cancer

> **NIH NIH R21** · NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY · 2022 · $169,469

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
With a 5-year survival rate of less than 5%, Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a lethal condition with poor
outcomes and an increasing incidence. Surgical resection is the only treatment that offers a potential cure, but
was limited to the early stage cases without distant metastasis. Currently, there are scarce effective treatments
for advanced disease. Chemoradiation and systemic chemotherapy are the mainstay of treatment to slow
disease progression at advanced stages. But these therapies cause various side effects, which is one major
barrier to the efficacy of anti-tumor therapeutics. There are no known medications that can selectively protect
normal tissues from these side effects, and thus an urgent need for novel treatment selectively targeting only
tumor cells to improve patient outcomes.
Exosomes secreted by tumor cells actively participate in tumor progression and metastasis and contain multiple
biomolecules reflecting the status of their parental tumor cells. Investigation of the exosomal contents may lead
to a therapeutic inspiration for cancer. We conducted comparative proteomics studies over the malignant and
nonmalignant cells at both the cellular and exosomal level. Significant different proteome sets have been
identified between the malignant and nonmalignant cells at all levels. Since amino acids are the formation unit
of the protein primary sequence, we furthered the proteomics results by studying the distribution of the amino
acids statistically between the malignant and nonmalignant cells at both cellular and exosomal level. We found
a significant imbalanced amino acid distribution between the tumor cells and exosomes, which is not found
between nonmalignant cells and exosomes. This indicates that tumor cells selectively flux certain amino acids
out of cells through exosomes, which inspired us to use these amino acids as stressors to tumor cells. The cell
viability of the tumor cells treated by these amino acids was significantly decreased, but not that of nonmalignant
cells. This exosome-guided observation potentiates a new therapeutic intervention selectively targeting tumor
cells. In order to develop the finding into a therapeutic choice for pancreatic cancer, we propose to preclinically
validate the treatment in vivo and study the mechanism in vitro.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10434501
- **Project number:** 1R21CA270748-01
- **Recipient organization:** NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Dali Sun
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $169,469
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-02-02 → 2024-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10434501

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10434501, Exosomal Contents Guided Amino Acids Treatment for Pancreatic Cancer (1R21CA270748-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10434501. Licensed CC0.

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