ExoSD chips for high-purity immunomagnetic separation and high-sensitivity detection of gastric cancer cell-derived exosomes

Abstract

Gastric cancer cell-derived exosomes as biomarkers have a very high application potential to the non-invasive detection of early-stage gastric cancer. However, the small size of exosomes (30-150 nm) results in huge challenges in separating and detecting them from complex media (e.g., plasma, urine, saliva, and cell culture supernatant). Here we proposed a highly integrated exosome separation and detection (ExoSD) chip to immunomagnetic separate exosomes from cell culture supernatant in a manner of continuous flow, and to immunofluorescence detect gastric cancer cell-derived exosomes with high sensitivity. The ExoSD chip has achieved a high exosome recovery (>80%) and purity (>83%) at the injection rate of 4.8 mL/h. Furthermore, experimental results based on clinical serum samples of patients with gastric cancer (stages I and II) show that the detection rate of the ExoSD chip is as high as 70%. The proposed ExoSD chip has been successfully demonstrated as a cutting-edge platform for exosomes separation and detection. It can be served as a versatile platform to extend to the applications of separation and detection of the other cell-derived exosomes or cells.

Keywords: Exosome detection; Exosome separation; Exosomes; Microfluidic chip; Microvesicles.