Challenges with EV Isolation a Key Topic at Recent EV Conferences

 EXOKĒRYX exhibits at SelectBIO's Innovations in Extracellular Vesicles Research: Technologies, Tools, Demos, & Applications.

EXOKĒRYX^TM enjoyed the privilege of sponsoring two conferences last month that are helping to push the boundaries of what's possible in EV research – SelectBIO’s Innovations in Extracellular Vesicles Research: Technologies, Tools, Demos, & Applications in Laguna Hills, California and the American Association of Extracellular Vesicles’ 2025 Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.

At SelectBIO, challenges with EV isolation was a commonly discussed theme. It was noted that EVs are a very heterogeneous population, contributing to the difficulties in developing reliable isolation techniques. Additionally, the outer layer of EVs is likely a fairly sparse matrix, and not all EVs will contain any or all of the typical tetraspanins that are commonly used for capture and isolation. This creates bias in certain isolation techniques and causes entire subsets of EVs to be lost during these isolation methods. It was also importantly noted that techniques that rely on antibody binding (i.e. immunoprecipitation) could be physically hindered by the fact that EVs have a “corona” of proteins, lipids, and other biomolecules, also leading to reduced and/or biased EV yield.

Many EV researchers shared their frustration with the current state of EV isolation technologies, and expressed excitement about the potential of new microfluidics-based methods. The current challenges include the standardization of EV-based diagnostics, reproducibility concerns, and regulatory hurdles. These obstacles contribute to variation in EV isolation and characterization that can affect diagnostic accuracy, making it difficult for clinicians to adopt and integrate EV diagnostics.

 EXOKĒRYX exhibits at AAEV's 2025 Annnual Meeting.

At the AAEV 2025 Annual Meeting, the conference was packed full of presentations and posters highlighting cutting-edge EV research and technologies. One common theme was the effort to create engineered EVs for the purpose of gene editing or therapeutic technologies. Of course, the role of EVs in biomarker discovery and liquid biopsy applications was also a common topic in the shared research. I particularly resonated with an idea in a presentation by Dr. Uta Erdbrügger (University of Virginia), where she talked about how, after decades of limited treatment options, we now have a therapeutic “tool box” of potential treatments for patients. What we are missing is the appropriate guidance to choose the most effective treatment for a patient that will maximize their results but minimize side effects. EVs can be a powerful tool to determine disease or site-specific biomarkers and thus lead to more effective and targeted treatment personalization. Dr. Erdbrügger also referred to urinary EVs as “story tellers”, because they can give us insight into diagnostics, disease mechanisms and origins, and markers of prognosis, monitoring, and safety. It is clear that EVs can greatly advance our understanding of disease progression and, importantly, allow us to provide more effective treatment and monitoring for patients.

Dr. Caitlin McAtee presents Demeter EVPrep and dielectrophoresis for EV isolation to attendees of AAEV's 2025 Annual Meeting.

Just as at SelectBIO, many speakers talked about the challenges of isolating and working with EVs. Dr. Shaurya Prakash (The Ohio State University) shared a particularly thorough slide that outlined the difficulties of EV work based on the complexity of biological fluids and the limitations of the current EV isolation technologies. Many biological fluids contain relatively dilute levels of EVs, and processing these fluids is slow and laborious, as there are many other components that need to be removed to increase purity of EV isolates. He also highlighted the huge pitfalls of the most common isolation techniques. Ultracentrifugation has a high cost and hands-on time and usually ends up with low EV yield and high contamination. Size-based methods also lack specificity and result in less pure isolations.

These consistent reports of the nearly universal challenges of EV isolation further encourages us at EXOKĒRYX in our mission – leveraging the novel application of chip-based technology and microfluidics to solve these problems and deliver better tools for EV researchers. Using semiconductor technology and microfluidics, EXOKĒRYX has developed a novel EV isolation system to selectively isolate EVs from biological fluids with a hands-off workflow that makes it reproducible by design. Learn more about automated, superior EV isolation on our Demeter EVPrep product page.