Direct isolation of small extracellular vesicles from human blood using viscoelastic microfluidics

• Published in: Science advances Vol. 9; no. 40; p. eadi5296
• Main Authors: Meng, Yingchao, Zhang, Yanan, Bühler, Marcel, Wang, Shuchen, Asghari, Mohammad, Stürchler, Alessandra, Mateescu, Bogdan, Weiss, Tobias, Stavrakis, Stavros, deMello, Andrew J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Association for the Advancement of Science 06-10-2023
• Subjects: Coloring Agents; Engineering; Extracellular Vesicles; Humans; Microfluidics; Neoplasms; Physical and Materials Sciences; Proteomics; Research Methods; SciAdv r-articles
• ISSN: 2375-2548; 2375-2548
• DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi5296

Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs; <200 nm) that contain lipids, nucleic acids, and proteins are considered promising biomarkers for a wide variety of diseases. Conventional methods for sEV isolation from blood are incompatible with routine clinical workflows, significantly hampering the utilization of blood-derived sEVs in clinical settings. Here, we present a simple, viscoelastic-based microfluidic platform for label-free isolation of sEVs from human blood. The separation performance of the device is assessed by isolating fluorescent sEVs from whole blood, demonstrating purities and recovery rates of over 97 and 87%, respectively. Significantly, our viscoelastic-based microfluidic method also provides for a remarkable increase in sEV yield compared to gold-standard ultracentrifugation, with proteomic profiles of blood-derived sEVs purified by both methods showing similar protein compositions. To demonstrate the clinical utility of the approach, we isolate sEVs from blood samples of 20 patients with cancer and 20 healthy donors, demonstrating that elevated sEV concentrations can be observed in blood derived from patients with cancer.