Mursla Bio, a precision medicine and diagnostics company built on tissue-specific extra­cellular vesicles (TS-EVs), has announced publication of a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles [1] (impact factor 21.7), the founding journal of the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles. The company says the paper validates its TS-EV platform for a new class of liquid biopsy: the multiomic disease biology of living cells in a chosen tissue, read from blood, starting with the liver. The study builds on work first released as a preprint in June 2025.

Selective enrichment of hepatocyte vesicles

Using the company’s NEXPLOR technology, the researchers selectively enriched hepatocyte-derived EVs (h-EVs) over EVs from other tissues, including lung, kidney, breast, adipose and muscle, and from the blood cells that dominate plasma. The multiomic content of the h-EVs was analysed against bulk EV preparations from the same clinical plasma samples, each under 2 mL, taken from patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) or cirrhosis and from healthy donors.

Broader proteome coverage

The h-EVs accessed a different part of the hepatocyte proteome, identifying 57% more proteins than bulk EVs, with better reproducibility. Bulk EVs were dominated by plasma proteins that the liver secretes, such as albumin, whereas h-EVs were enriched in the internal machinery of hepatocytes: membrane, cytosolic and mitochondrial proteins, including EV-defining markers.

Compared with healthy donors, the h-EV fraction revealed 86 proteins that were uniquely detected or significantly increased in liver disease, against four unique proteins and no significant differential signal in bulk EVs. These 86 proteins reflected what cirrhosis and HCC share: fibrosis, disordered fat metabolism and inflammation. When HCC was compared with cirrhosis, the h-EV fraction resolved HCC-defining proteins, together with a wider set of proteins that cohered as a network. Paired bulk EVs yielded neither.

A similar pattern in microRNA

Small-RNA sequencing supported a similar conclusion in a second molecular layer. In the same comparison, the h-EV fraction yielded fewer differentially expressed microRNAs than paired bulk EVs, yet only the h-EV microRNAs mapped to HCC signalling, while the bulk set mapped to a more generalised inflammatory response. The same h-EVs were present in the bulk EV preparation, suggesting that the lack of tissue specificity holding back microRNAs as liquid biopsy biomarkers could be overcome.

Extension to other tissues and clinical uses

NEXPLOR is a core component of Mursla Bio’s broader TS-EV platform. The hepatocyte panel is the company’s first, and the discovery and orthogonal validation route behind it is designed to extend to other tissues, with further panels in development. The platform underpins EvoLiver™, which has FDA Breakthrough Device designation, and precision medicine programmes with pharmaceutical partners. Its applications span clinical diagnostics, from disease surveillance to molecular residual disease, and precision medicine, including patient stratification, pharmacodynamic biomarkers and companion diagnostics.

Dr Tomás Dias, Chief Scientific Officer of Mursla Bio, said: “EVs are released by virtually every tissue into the bloodstream. They carry health and disease markers that can be traced back to their origin, much as a tissue biopsy would. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive validation to date of a platform for tissue-specific EV isolation from human plasma.”

Pierre Arsène, Founder and CEO of Mursla Bio, added: “Much of liquid biopsy has focused on measuring more analytes. Our thesis is that biological context matters as much as analytical depth. That is the foundation of EvoLiver and of the precision medicine programmes we are building with pharma partners.”

Reference:
1. Tissue-specific isolation of hepatocyte extracellular vesicles from human plasma enables tissue-resolved proteomic and miRNA profiling, Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, 2026; 15:e70372.
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