Exosomal cargo secreted from
cancer cells has been associated with the development and progression of the tumour. Enriching clinically relevant tissue-specific exosomes may assist in the focused analysis of
RNA molecules packaged during
cancer. Therefore, this study utilized a rapid immunomagnetic enrichment approach for targeted isolation of
lung cancer cell-derived exosomes from human plasma, followed by analysing their cargo
RNA using high throughput sequencing. The total
RNA purified from these immunomagnetically enriched exosomes provided adequate
RNA quality for characterization through the Illumina platform. Differential expression analysis was performed between patients and healthy controls to study the altered exosomal
RNA profile during
lung cancer. Further, functional enrichment analysis was performed with the list of identified differentially expressed genes (DEGs). In total, 1383 mRNAs and 64
lncRNA were identified as differentially expressed between patient plasma exosomes than healthy controls (fold change > 2, P < 0.05). Kyoto encyclopaedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis revealed that the DEGs were mainly associated with
cancer-related pathways,
purine metabolism,
calcium, and cGMP-PKG signalling pathways. In conclusion, the presented approach successfully demonstrated a novel strategy for focused disease-specific transcriptome analysis, which provides a feasible option for identifying disease-specific exosome
biomarkers for detecting non-small
lung cancer.