A double tangential flow filtration-based microfluidic device for highly efficient separation and enrichment of exosomes

Recently, exosomes have been recognized as important disease biomarkers due to the essential roles they played in disease development. Nevertheless, the highly efficient isolation and enrichment of exosomes from complex body fluids continues to hinder the research and application of exosomes for clinical use. In this work, we developed a double tangential flow filtration-based microfluidic device for exosome isolation from cell supernatants and human serum. The microfluidic device contained two modules. Each module included two polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) plates with symmetrical serpentine channels and a nanoporous membrane with 200 nm or 30 nm pore diameter and was used to separate larger vesicles, exosomes and free biomolecules. The design of double tangential flow filtration in symmetrical serpentine channels largely increased the contact area between the filtrate and the nanoporous membranes, thus improved the separation efficiency and prevented the clogging of the membrane. Compared with standard separation method, i.e. ultracentrifugation (UC), the microfluidic chip-based separation (Chip) of exosomes showed the advantages of much lower instrumental cost, lower consumable cost, shorter time (<120 min), higher purity (82.8%) and significantly higher recovery rate (77.8%). In addition, due to the label-free separation, the microfluidic device-collected exosomes could be directly used for downstream analysis such as proteomics analysis. The proteomics analysis results of exosomes isolated from the sera of clinical patients with different diseases by the chip revealed richer disease-related information comparing with those exosomes isolated by UC, demonstrating the good practicability of this chip for future clinical research and applications.