EXOKĒRYX recently had the pleasure and privilege of sponsoring ISEV’s 2nd Symposium on EVs in Nervous Systems at McGill University's distinguished The Neuro in Montreal, Canada. This inspiring event was 2.5 days jam packed with presentations sharing the latest discoveries on the role of extracellular vesicles in nervous system health and disease. More than 35 oral presentations and 50 posters covered topics ranging from EV biomarker discovery to signaling pathways to functionality and more. Presenters discussed the role and potential therapeutic effect of extracellular vesicles in aging, cognitive decline, depression, and, of course, brain cancer, among many others.
With earlier disease detection being the key driver behind EXOKĒRYX's mission of putting better tools in the hands of EV researchers, it was the presentations that focused on this topic that resonated with us the most. Dr. Franz Ricklefs from University Medical Center Hamburg gave a fascinating talk on the use of tumor-secreted EVs to detect CNS tumors via liquid biopsy. Dr. Gagan Deep from Wake Forest University similarly spoke about the potential for liquid biopsy detection of Alzheimer's disease using small neuronal EVs. While detection and diagnosis of CNS tumors and Alzheimer's disease are very different, both require methods that are some combination of expensive, invasive, and subjective, making early, accessible detection an impossibility. Research like that of Drs. Ricklefs, Deep and their colleagues demonstrates the potential of EVs to deliver on the promise of early, accessible detection - and, therefore, treatment - of these debilitating and deadly diseases for all.
And yet, as fascinating and far-reaching as this research is, it continues to be limited by tools that are simply insufficient for the job. EV isolation remains the key culprit in throttling EV discovery. Poor EV yields have the potential to undermine research outcomes simply because you can't measure what isn't there. And EV isolation techniques that deliver higher recovery of EVs also recover more contaminants, like lipoproteins, that can interfere with downstream analyses. What's more, manual EV isolation methods are highly dependent on operator technique, making EV isolation - and the analyses that depend on it - inherently unreproducible.
Dr. Caitlin McAtee spoke to this accomplished group of researchers on EXOKĒRYX's efforts to address these problems and deliver higher quality, reproducible EV isolation. Using semiconductor technology and microfluidics, EXOKĒRYX has developed a novel EV isolation system to selectively isolate EVs from biological fluids with with a hands-off workflow that makes it reproducible by design. Learn more about automated, superior EV isolation on our Demeter EVPrep product page.