Bert Dhondt

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Uro-gynaecology

We argue that the field of extracellular vesicle (EV) biology needs more transparent reporting to facilitate interpretation and replication of experiments. To achieve this, we describe EV-TRACK, a crowdsourcing knowledgebase (http://evtrack.org) that centralizes EV biology and methodology with the goal of stimulating authors, reviewers, editors and...

The last decade has seen a sharp increase in the number of scientific publications describing physiological and pathological functions of extracellular vesicles (EVs), a collective term covering various subtypes of cell-released, membranous structures, called exosomes, microvesicles, microparticles, ectosomes, oncosomes, apoptotic bodies, and many...

Recent years have seen an increase of extracellular vesicle (EV) research geared towards biological understanding, diagnostics and therapy. However, EV data interpretation remains challenging owing to complexity of biofluids and technical variation introduced during sample preparation and analysis. To understand and mitigate these limitations, we g...

Extracellular vesicles (EV) are increasingly being recognized as important vehicles of intercellular communication and promising diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in cancer. Despite this enormous clinical potential, the plethora of methods to separate EV from biofluids, providing material of highly variable purity, and lacking knowledge regardin...

Peri-operative SARS-CoV-2 infection increases postoperative mortality. The aim of this study was to determine the optimal duration of planned delay before surgery in patients who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection. This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study included patients undergoing elective or emergency surgery during October 2020. Su...

Background The 2015 Lancet Commission on global surgery identified surgery and anaesthesia as indispensable parts of holistic health-care systems. However, COVID-19 exposed the fragility of planned surgical services around the world, which have also been neglected in pandemic recovery planning. This study aimed to develop and validate a novel index...

Urinary extracellular vesicles (uEVs) are enriched with glycosylated proteins which have been extensively studied as putative biomarkers of urological cancers. Here, we characterized the glycosylation and integrin profile of EVs derived from urological cancer cell lines. We used fluorescent europium-doped nanoparticles coated with lectins and antib...

Background: Blood plasma is commonly used for biomarker research of extracellular vesicles (EVs). Removing all cells prior to analysis of EVs is essential. Objectives: We therefore studied the efficacy of the most commonly used centrifugation protocol to prepare cell-free plasma. Methods: Plasma was prepared according the double centrifugation...

SARS‐CoV‐2 has been associated with an increased rate of venous thromboembolism in critically ill patients. Since surgical patients are already at higher risk of venous thromboembolism than general populations, this study aimed to determine if patients with peri‐operative or prior SARS‐CoV‐2 were at further increased risk of venous thromboembolism....

We aimed to determine the impact of pre-operative isolation on postoperative pulmonary complications after elective surgery during the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. We performed an international prospective cohort study including patients undergoing elective surgery in October 2020. Isolation was defined as the period before surgery during which pati...

Background: Preoperative SARS-CoV-2 vaccination could support safer elective surgery. Vaccine numbers are limited so this study aimed to inform their prioritization by modelling. Methods: The primary outcome was the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one COVID-19-related death in 1 year. NNVs were based on postoperative SARS-CoV-2 rates an...

Objectives: The PREDICT study aimed to determine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected surgical services and surgical patients and to identify predictors of outcomes in this cohort. Background: High mortality rates were reported for surgical patients with COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. However, the indirect impact of the pandemic o...

Objectives: To investigate the role of cytoreductive radical prostatectomy in addition to the standard of care for patients with newly diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer. Materials and methods: This multicentric, prospective study included asymptomatic patients from 2014-2018 (NCT02138721). Radical prostatectomy was offered to all fit patients...

We describe a simple, non-invasive assay to identify fucosylated-glycoisoform of integrin alpha-3 (ITGA3) directly from unprocessed urine. ITGA3 was detected directly from the urine of bladder cancer (BlCa) (n=13) and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) (n=9) patients with the use of lectins coated on europium-doped-nanoparticles (Eu³⁺-NPs). Lectin...

The use of blood-based extracellular RNA (exRNA) as clinical biomarker requires the implementation of a validated procedure for sample collection, processing and profiling. So far, no study has systematically addressed the pre-analytical variables affecting transcriptome analysis of exRNAs. In the exRNAQC study, we evaluated 10 blood collection tub...

Background In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, patients have continued to present with endocrine (surgical) pathology in an environment depleted of resources. This study investigated how the pandemic affected endocrine surgery practice. Methods PanSurg-PREDICT is an international, multicentre, prospective, observational cohort study of emergenc...

Supplementary Data from the publication entitled: "SARS-CoV-2 vaccination modelling for safe surgery to save lives: data from an international prospective cohort study"

De diagnose van prostaatkanker wordt gesteld door middel van een prostaatbiopsie, uitgevoerd naar aanleiding van een verhoogde PSA-waarde (prostaatspecifiek antigen) in het bloed en/of abnormaal rectaal toucher. Traditioneel worden transrectaal, op systematische wijze en onder echogeleide, 12 biopten uit de prostaat gepreleveerd. Op die manier word...

The multidimensional cargo of extracellular vesicles (EV) released in urine is a reflection of the pathophysiological processes occurring within their cells and tissues of origin in the urogenital system. Here, we describe a step-by-step protocol for density-based separation of urinary EV with high specificity and repeatability. The implementation...

RNA profiling has emerged as a powerful tool to investigate the biomarker potential of human biofluids. Despite the interest in extracellular nucleic acids, RNA sequencing methods to quantify the total RNA content outside cells are rare. Therefore, we evaluated the performance of the SMARTer Stranded Total RNA-Seq method in human platelet-rich plas...

p>Cancer biomarker studies require procedures that provide accurate and precise test results with high analytical sensitivity. Consequently, the growing use of extracellular RNA from human biofluids as clinically relevant biomarker requires the implementation of benchmarked methods for sample collection, processing, and profiling. While several sma...

Purpose To explore the prognostic importance of metastatic volume in a contemporary daily practice cohort of patients with newly diagnosed metastatic hormone-naive prostate cancer (mHNPC) and to develop a pragmatic prognostic model to predict survival for these patients. Methods Since 2014, 113 patients with newly diagnosed mHNPC were prospectivel...

Purpose: Patients with oligometastatic prostate cancer (PC) may benefit from metastasis-directed therapy (MDT), delaying disease progression and the start of palliative systemic treatment. However, a significant proportion of oligometastatic PC patients progress to polymetastatic PC within a year following MDT, suggesting an underestimation of the...

Introduction and objective: The use of intravesical onabotulinum-A toxin (BoNT-A) injections in the treatment of idiopathic detrusor overactivity has been widely studied in adults [2-5]. However, in pediatric populations, study groups are small, and results are not yet sufficient to support this treatment as a standard practice. The aim of this st...

RNA profiling has emerged as a powerful tool to investigate the biomarker potential of human biofluids. However, despite enormous interest in extracellular nucleic acids, RNA sequencing methods to quantify the total RNA content outside cells are rare. Here, we evaluate the performance of the SMARTer Stranded Total RNA-Seq method in human platelet-r...

RNA profiling has emerged as a powerful tool to investigate the biomarker potential of human biofluids. However, despite enormous interest in extracellular nucleic acids, RNA sequencing methods to quantify the total RNA content outside cells are rare. Here, we evaluate the performance of the SMARTer Stranded Total RNA-Seq method in human platelet-r...

Objectives: Disease progression in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) is dependent on androgen signaling. This case describes the complex adaptive androgen signaling mechanisms in mCRPC and illustrates that caution should be exercised when treating these patients with drugs influencing the androgen axis. Methods: Single case...

The last decade has seen a sharp increase in the number of scientific publications describing physiological and pathological functions of extracellular vesicles (EVs), a collective term covering various subtypes of cell-released, membranous structures, called exosomes, microvesicles, microparticles, ectosomes, oncosomes, apoptotic bodies, and many...

Identification and validation of extracellular vesicle (EV)-associated biomarkers requires robust isolation and characterization protocols. We assessed the impact of some commonly implemented pre-analytical, analytical and post-analytical variables in EV research. Centrifugal filters with different membrane types and pore sizes are used to reduce l...

Purpose The goal of this work was to investigate the oncological outcome of whole pelvis radiotherapy (wpRT) in pathologic pelvic lymph node-positive (pN1) prostate cancer (PCa), evaluate the location of relapse, and identify potential prognostic factors. Patients and methods All patients undergoing pelvic lymph node dissection (PLND) since the ye...

Extracellular vesicles transfer lipids, nucleic acids and membrane-associated as well as intraluminal proteins between cells to maintain homeostasis and regulate physiological functions. This communication system is hijacked in cancer. Tumour-derived extracellular vesicles enter the circulation and carry targeting motifs and unique messages for cel...

Heterogeneity in extracellular vesicle (EV) research hampers reproducibility amongst different research groups. Common parameters, such as isolation method, enhance heterogeneity and have already been described extensively. Here we describe seemingly small technical parameters that however drastically impact isolation and analysis of EVs.