Enrichment of extracellular vesicles with lipid nanoprobe functionalized nanostructured silica

Nanoscale extracellular vesicles (nEVs) have recently demonstrated potential value in cancer diagnostics and treatment monitoring, but translation has been limited by technical challenges in nEV isolation. Thus, we have developed a one-step nEV isolation platform that utilizes nEV size-matched silica nanostructures and a surface-conjugated lipid nanoprobe with an integrated microfluidic mixer. The reported platform has 28.8% capture efficiency from pancreatic cancer plasma and can sufficiently enrich nEVs for simpler positive identification of point mutations, particularly KRAS, in nEV DNA from the plasma of pancreatic cancer patients.