Claudio Pinheiro

CRIG member
Claudio Pinheiro


Doctoral fellow - Laboratory for Experimental Cancer Research - UGent, faculty of medicine and health sciences
Principal Investigator: prof. An Hendrix (PhD)

 

Research focus

Research into extracellular vesicles (EV) has yielded important biological insights and raised the prospect of developing novel diagnostics and therapeutics for a wide range of pathologies. However, the plethora of methods to separate EV and the complexity of biofluids present considerable challenges for rigorous and reproducible research as a basis for clinical application. Several technologies have been developed to separate EV, but there are no appropriate and quantifiable performance metrics available for these technologies which hampers informed selection of the most appropriate method for the particular study objectives.
We have designed the extracellular vesicle quality control (EVQC) study with the aim to systematically compare the performance of 14 frequently implemented separation methods. These methods are implemented to separate EV from blood, urine and cell culture supernatant spiked or not with recombinant EV (rEV). EV preparations are compared in terms of repeatability, sensitivity, accuracy, specificity and efficiency at protein, nucleic acid and structural level. The final goal of the EVQC consortium is the development of a guiding tool for the informed selection of a separation method for particular study goals.
 

Contact & links