Dr. Eberhard Trams—The man who coined the name “exosomes”—A prescient but largely forgotten pioneer

While the approved term to describe the membrane-bound particles released from cells is now "extracellular vesicles," there is no doubt that the trivial term "exosomes" is now firmly embedded into the scientific lexicon.Recently, a history of extracellular vesicle research was published (Couch et al., 2021).In it, a passing mention is made to the group working under Dr. Eberhard Trams in the Laboratory of Developmental and Metabolic Neurology in NINCDS, NIH, Bethesda, USA.In a single sentence, it states that Trams et al. in 1981 originally coined the term "exosome" to describe the extracellular vesicles (EVs) shed from the surface of the cell (Trams et al., 1981).As two of the individuals who worked in Trams' lab in the early 1980s, we would like to explain why this innovative scientist should receive greater recognition-he was one of the first scientists to describe an isolation protocol and then conduct an initial characterization of these extracellular vesicles.The title of the 1981 article is "Exfoliation of membrane ectoenzymes in the form of micro-vesicles" "but concludes with the words.…suchplasma membrane-derived vesicles could be referred to generically as exosomes" We will describe the tragic circumstances that cut short his pioneering research into extracellular vesicles.To do that we need to go back in time to describe the work being done in that laboratory from about 1979 until 1982.Like most laboratories in NIH at that time, the Laboratory of Developmental and Metabolic Neurology was just a single room.Dr. Trams had his own table and chair but the other four scientists working in the lab at that time (two Americans, Carl Lauter and Norman Salem Jr. and two Finns, Ewen MacDonald and Matti Reinilä) were crammed into what was essentially a tiny chemical store room.It had only two seats; when all four were present, it was a kind of musical chairs, if a seat became vacant for a few seconds when you went into the laboratory, it would be occupied on your return!During the early 1980s, there were two main projects being conducted in the laboratory-MacDonald and Reinilä were developing assays to measure the different ATPase enzymes present in red blood cell membranes while Lauter and Salem Jr. were working with neural cell cultures-and it is this latter work on which this short historical article will focus.

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