Exosomes are nanovesicles secreted into the extracellular environment upon internal vesicle fusion with the plasma membrane. Exosomes are 50 - 150 m (av. 100 m) in diameter, have a density of 1.13 - 1.19 g/mL. Typically, 1 × 10¹² exosomes exist in one m of blood. These exosomes are associated with cancer in that some tumor cells are very dynamic at emitting exosomes into the circulating vasculature. These tumor-derived exosomes contain distinct genetic information that provides insight into tumor existence, cellular type, state of malignancy, and susceptibility to therapeutic treatment. For these reasons, exosomes play important roles as valuable biomedical tools for cancer research, and the strengths of the exosomal-cellular mode of communication will assist the development of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. Exosomes have been purified from biological fluids using a variety of strategies and techniques. In general, exosomes are isolated through ultracentrifugation, typically at 100,000 or higher. However, this procedure is time - consuming (4-5 hours) and yields a relatively low recovery (5 % - 25%) . In order to overcome the limitation where the highly efficient isolation of exosomes is one of the major technical hurdles in the field of exosomes-based diagnostics and therapeutics. In this regard students should be able to suggest a novel microfluidic device in which the intact exosomes should be purified in an ultra-high speed manner
The conditions are as follows: the microfluidic device should be able to isolate the exosomes from one ml of human blood sample, the number of exosomes in the sample should be estimated before the sample solution is subject to the microfluidic channel, the performance of the device should be described with various parameters in detailed manner, detailed specifications should be included with the form of table in the answer sheet, all the description are highly recommended by schematic drawings with detalied caption.
