Development of size-selective microfluidic platform

Exosomes are nanosized extracellular vesicles that play a significant role in cell-cell communication. Recently, there is significant interest in exosome-related fundamental research, especially subgroups of exosomes as potential biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. In this paper, we report a new size selective isolation method via elastic lift force and nanomembrane filtration and demonstrated the liposome recovery rate of 92.5% from a mixture solution of 1 pm polystyrene beads, 100 nm liposomes and proteins as a proof of concept for exosome isolation. This single microfluidic platform offers an improved approach with short processing time (< 2 hours) and low cost, and shows potential broad applicability to cancer biomarker studies.