Abstract
In recent years, expectations have been raised for the emergence of new diagnostic and therapeutic technologies based on extracellular vesicles. On the other hand, it is not easy to measure and manipulate a heterogeneous population of particles with diameters ranging from tens of nm to 100 nm, and there is a need to establish fundamental technologies that support the reliability, safety, and standardization of exosome medicine. For example, the dynamic light scattering method is widely used to measure the size of nanoparticles, but in this method, instead of measuring individual particles, the particle population is irradiated with laser light, and the autocorrelation function of the temporal variation of the scattered light intensity caused by the Brownian motion of the particles is measured and analyzed to obtain the particle size distribution. Single-particle measurements can avoid this problem, but the technical difficulty of detecting and manipulating particles as small as several tens of nanometers is high, and a new breakthrough is needed. Therefore, we have been developing a platform technology to enable single particle measurement of exosomes by applying biodevice technologies such as microfluidic devices and array of chips. In this paper, we introduce the recent development trend of electrophoresis chip for zeta potential measurement, nanoparticle separation device, and exosome array chip, and discuss the development trend and prospects of exosome evaluation and separation technology.
