Open Access

Birte Weber, Dirk Henrich, Ingo Marzi, Liudmila Leppik

• Highlights • CD62p + exosomes were significantly increased in septic polytrauma-patients, while CD40+, as well as CD49e + exosomes were diminished. • Exosomal IL-6 concentration in septic patients reflects the systemic IL-6. • Exosomal IL-10 concentration seemed to be constant in patients and healthy controls. • Decrease of miR-21 in exosomes was associated with the development of sepsis, while exosomal miR-93, miR-155 and miR-92a were not specifically altered. Abstract Sepsis as a severe systemic inflammation leads oftentimes to organ dysfunction and subsequently to death. In polytrauma patients, septic complications represent with 45% the predominant cause of late death and are responsible for extremely high costs in the healthcare system. Therefore, clinicians have to detect as early as possible the begin of sepsis to improve the patient's outcome. One new promising diagnostic tool to diagnose septic complications in polytraumatized patients are exosomes. Plasma samples from polytraumatized patients (Injury Severity Score (ISS) ≥16) which developed sepsis (n = 10) and without sepsis (n = 10), were collected at emergency room (ER), 24h and 5 days after trauma. The EVs subpopulations were investigated by a bead-based multiplex flow cytometry measurement of surface epitopes and were compared with plasma EVs from healthy controls (n = 10). Moreover, exosomal cytokine concentrations were measured via high-sensitive ELISA and were correlated with systemic concentrations. For miRNA cargo analysis, we analysed the miRNAs miR-1298-5p, miR-1262, miR-125b-5p, miR-92a-3p, miR-93-5p, miR-155-5p and miR-21-5p and compared their exosomal concentrations by means of RT-qPCR. CD62p + exosomes were significantly increased in septic polytrauma-patients (p ≤ 0.05), while CD40+exosomes, as well as CD49e + exosomes were diminished (p ≤ 0.05). Furthermore, we observed that the exosomal IL-6 concentration reflects the systemic IL-6 concentration (r2 = 0.63) and did not significantly alter between patients with and without sepsis. The exosomal IL-10 concentration seemed to be constant in all patients and healthy controls. We observed that a decrease of miR-21-5p in exosomes was associated with the development of sepsis (p ≤ 0.05), while exosomal miR-93-5p, miR-155-5p and miR-92a-3p were not specifically altered in septic patients. Taken together, the present study in polytraumatized patients demonstrated that the development of sepsis is associated with an increase of CD62p + exosomes. Furthermore, the exosomal cargo was changed in septic patients: miR-21-5p was diminished.