Mitochondria Found in Blood Might Bring New Tools for Early Cancer Detection

What is blood made of? While you may think that this question has already been well answered, French researchers discovered the presence of a new component in the blood. 

In a breakthrough study published in The Faseb Journal, the authors report their discovery of the presence of fully functional, respiratory competent, extracellular mitochondria in blood. Prior to this study only cell‐derived mitochondrial components have been found in the extracellular space. Interestingly, Mitochondria seem to be present in large numbers: “We estimate that there are between 200 000 and 3.7 million cell-free intact mitochondria per mL of plasma”.

This discovery may have implications for cancer diagnosis. As mentioned in Science Daily, “the research team is now devoting its attention to evaluating the extracellular mitochondria as biomarkers in non-invasive prenatal diagnosis and cancer.”

Both plasma of healthy individuals and cell culture media contain structurally intact mitochondria. Fluorescence microscopy images of the MitoTracker Green stained 16gP from PPAP plasma A, SW620 CCCM B, and DLD-1 CCCM C, Electron microscopy images of the 16gP from of a PPAP plasma D, SW620 CCCM E, and DLD-1 CCCM F. From: Al Amir Dache, Z., Otandault, A., Tanos, R., Pastor, B., Meddeb, R., Sanchez, C., … & El Messaoudi, S. (2019). Blood contains circulating cell‐free respiratory competent mitochondria. The FASEB Journal.

 

How Many Publications are Found in Synapse, Your Connection to MSK Authors?

Every month, the Synapse Team keeps busy locating new publications written by our authors, adding them to the Synapse database, cleaning and enhancing the metadata, and assigning them to our author’s profile pages. And when the monthly work is done, we do not rest! The team then moves on to retrospective content, with the goal to one day have a single database containing the citations for all publications from MSK back to 1884.

In the last year, the team added a total of 11,980 works to Synapse. About half of those account for new works, published in 2019, or late arrivals from 2018. The other half covers our retrospective work, which as of last week now goes back to 1991. This means Synapse now contains the publishing output of MSK for the last 29 years.

As of today, Synapse has a total of 78,157 publications– works including journal articles, meeting abstracts, conference proceedings, and books.

Want more information about Synapse? Contact us.

New Essential Journal: NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery

The library now subscribes to a new journal, NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery. NEJM Catalyst is a new peer-reviewed journal from the publishers of the New England Journal of Medicine. It aims “to accelerate the transformation of health care delivery and improve patient health by publishing authoritative and actionable content for health care leaders, practitioners, and researchers.”

Articles will examine how health services should be organized, delivered, and financed, research reports on topics and surveys from the NEJM Catalyst Insights Council; case studies of care delivery, and examinations of public policy that affect healthcare delivery. This journal is now available in OneSearch.