Abstract
Ovarian cancer is a disease that poses a harmful threat to the health of many women with a majority of cases leading to death, especially pertaining to patients diagnosed in the later stages of the disease. Due to the nature of this cancer many patients will suffer from its symptoms without knowing what the cause is. To improve the chances of survival a method of early detection would be a promising avenue, however current technologies lack the ability to provide a reliable early diagnosis. A very recent approach to cancer analysis and diagnosis research regards the usage of exosomes as a detectable biomarker, due to the discovery that exosomes that originate from cancerous cells have a different composition than non-cancerous cells, this difference is detectable by flow cytometry and spectroscopy techniques such as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS). A detection method based on exosomes would thus allow for an earlier detection of cancer, due to the fact exosomes are secreted by all cells. This research effort has focused on the cultivation of ovarian cancer cells in the absence of serum, isolation, extraction, and purification of exosomes to allow for various methods of characterization such as flow cytometry and spectroscopy techniques (FTIR and SERS).