Cross-flow microfiltration for isolation, selective capture and release of liposarcoma extracellular vesicles

We present a resource-efficient approach to fabricate and operate a micro-nanofluidic device that uses cross-flow filtration to isolate and capture liposarcoma derived extracellular vesicles (EVs). The isolated extracellular vesicles were captured using EV-specific protein markers to obtain vesicle enriched media, which was then eluted for further analysis. Therefore, the micro-nanofluidic device integrates the unit operations of size-based separation with CD63 antibody immunoaffinity-based capture of extracellular vesicles in the same device to evaluate EV-cargo content for liposarcoma. The eluted media collected showed similar to 76% extracellular vesicle recovery from the liposarcoma cell conditioned media and similar to 32% extracellular vesicle recovery from dedifferentiated liposarcoma patient serum when compared against state-of-art extracellular vesicle isolation and subsequent quantification by ultracentrifugation. The results reported here also show a five-fold increase in amount of critical liposarcoma- relevant extracellular vesicle cargo obtained in 30 min presenting a significant advance over existing state-of-art.

Automated summary

This study presents a resource-efficient approach using a micro-nanofluidic device for isolating and capturing liposarcoma-derived extracellular vesicles, leading to a significant advance in retrieval of critical liposarcoma-relevant extracellular vesicle cargo compared to state-of-the-art methods.