Claudio Pinheiro

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.
 

• Lab address: Laboratory of Experimental Cancer Research (LECR), Department of human structure and repair, 2 RTP, entrance 98 , Corneel Heymanslaan 10, 9000 Gent
• LECR
• Training in extracellular vesicles