This dissertation addresses the urgent clinical need to develop and identify blood-based biomarkers for cancer that can help avoid unnecessary surgeries for benign masses and triage patients for the appropriate surgeries. To address this challenge, I investigate proteases and their sensitive proteolytic behavior for use as blood-based biomarkers for cancer detection applications. I also evaluate whether the subfraction of protease activity associated with extracellular vesicles improves the diagnostic performance of protease activity by reducing the background from healthy tissue-derived free-floating proteases within blood-based samples.
