Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Padua, Via Marzolo 8, 35131 Padua, Italy.
Department of Comparative Biomedicine and Food Science, University of Padua, Viale dell'Università 16, 35020 Legnaro, Italy.
Biosensors (Basel). 2022 Dec 29;13(1):50. doi: 10.3390/bios13010050.
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are double-layered lipid membrane vesicles released by cells. Currently, EVs are attracting a lot of attention in the biological and medical fields due to their role as natural carriers of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. Thus, they can transport useful genomic information from their parental cell through body fluids, promoting cell-to-cell communication even between different organs. Due to their functionality as cargo carriers and their protein expression, they can play an important role as possible diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in various types of diseases, e.g., cancers, neurodegenerative, and autoimmune diseases. Today, given the invaluable importance of EVs, there are some pivotal challenges to overcome in terms of their isolation. Conventional methods have some limitations: they are influenced by the starting sample, might present low throughput and low purity, and sometimes a lack of reproducibility, being operator dependent. During the past few years, several microfluidic approaches have been proposed to address these issues. In this review, we summarize the most important microfluidic-based devices for EV isolation, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages compared to existing technology, as well as the current state of the art from the perspective of the use of these devices in clinical applications.
细胞外囊泡 (EVs) 是由细胞释放的双层脂质膜囊泡。目前，EVs 因其作为蛋白质、脂质和核酸的天然载体的作用而在生物和医学领域引起了广泛关注。因此，它们可以通过体液将有用的基因组信息从其亲代细胞传递出去，促进细胞间甚至不同器官之间的通讯。由于其作为货物载体的功能及其蛋白表达，它们可以作为各种类型疾病（如癌症、神经退行性疾病和自身免疫性疾病）的潜在诊断和预后生物标志物发挥重要作用。如今，鉴于 EVs 的极其重要性，在其分离方面还存在一些关键挑战。传统方法存在一些局限性：它们受起始样本的影响，可能具有低通量和低纯度，并且有时缺乏重现性，并且依赖于操作人员。在过去的几年中，已经提出了几种微流控方法来解决这些问题。在这篇综述中，我们总结了用于 EV 分离的最重要的基于微流控的设备，重点介绍了它们与现有技术相比的优缺点，以及从这些设备在临床应用中的使用角度来看的最新进展。
