Designing a microchip for exosome isolation with the ability to simultaneously impregnate it with imatinib: an in vitro analysis

Abstract

Exosomes, a small bilayer membrane derived from eukaryotic cells, have been identified as a useful natural delivery platform due to their suitable size, biocompatibility, structural stability, high loading capacity, and editable surface capability. Due to the difficulty of maintaining the highly pure exosome, several attempts have conducted the techniques for exosome isolation. In recent years, microstructures have found many applications in chemistry, biology, and medicine due to their high accuracy and low cost of materials. Soft lithography is a low-cost, fast, accurate, and yet widely used method of construction of Micron channels. In the present study, a soft lithography process has been performed to construct channels for exosome separation with immunoaffinity function. Both biochemical and biophysical categories tests were performed to examine the quality of extracted exosomes from different sources (serum, cell supernatant, and urine) and compared with the commercially available kit. Results showed that the current technique was capable to isolate exosomes with a high yield rate, purity, and low time consumption. All forms of the imatinib loaded exosomes exhibited the antitumor activity against KYO-1 cell line.