Fig. 3.

Head and neck cancer patient derived exosomes induce neurite outgrowth. Quantified neurite outgrowth of PC12 cells following plasma (a) or tissue (b) exosome stimulation. NGF (100 ng/ml) serves as a positive control. Nl1- Nl3 non-cancer control blood, Pt1-Pt8 cancer patients, TL1,2 normal tonsils. n = 3 technical replicates/sample; assay repeated at least n = 2 times with similar results. The exosome yield from TL1 was low and insufficient for multiple replicates. For statistical analysis, one-way ANOVA with post-hoc Fisher’s Least Significant Difference (LSD) test was used; LSD p values reported; *p ≤ 0.03; ns, not significant, center value used was the mean. Error bars, standard deviation. The variance between groups compared is similar. All comparisons and LSD p values found in Supplementary Tables 1-3