ExoSOUND: An Acoustofluidic Device for Exosome Isolation - Project Summary
Exosomes are extracellular vesicles (40¿100 nm) found in nearly all biological fluids, including blood, urine,
saliva, and cerebrospinal fluid. In recent years they have emerged as a potentially powerful tool for biomedical
research, biomarker discovery, disease diagnostics, and health monitoring. Exosomes perform diverse cellular
functions such as intercellular communication, antigen presentation, and transfer of proteins, mRNA, and
miRNA. The proteins found inside of exosomes are characteristic of their cell of origin and many exosomal
proteins are linked to diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diseases of the kidney, liver, and placenta.
Exosomes possess advantages over other circulating biomarkers in that they are highly abundant (thousands to
billions per microliter of biofluid), can be collected noninvasively during early stages of disease development,
and are very durable, preserving their content through multiple freeze and thaw cycles. While many discoveries
have been made in identifying new exosomal protein biomarkers, the difficulties involved in the isolation of
exosomes have prevented their widespread use in biomedical research and clinical applications. As a result,
there exists a critical need in the research and clinical communities for a simple, rapid, biocompatible, and
effective approach for isolating exosomes form biological fluids or in vitro cell culture. In this SBIR project, we
will address this unmet need by developing and commercializing acoustofluidic (i.e., the fusion of acoustics and
microfluidics) technologies for point-of-care, automated exosome isolation. We name our acoustofluidic
exosome-solation technology ExoSOUND. In our Phase-I-type R&D efforts, Ascent has successfully
demonstrated the utility and feasibility of the proposed devices by meeting or exceeding the target values of
each of the three key parameters identified in the Measures of Success. In Phase II, our commercialization
activities will improve performance of the disposable ExoSOUND chips, develop self-contained, beta-testing-
ready prototypes, and validate their performance with end users. The proposed ExoSOUND technology will have
the following features: 1) Automated exosome isolation, which enables excellent biohazard containment and
short processing time (e.g., <20 min to isolate exosomes directly from 100 µL undiluted blood), which is
significantly less than that of the benchmark technologies (~8 hours); 2) High exosome yield (>82%) in
comparison to the benchmark technologies (5¿25%); 3) Better ability to isolate biologically active and
morphologically intact exosomes than the benchmark technologies; 4) Low driving voltage (<10 V), which
simplifies electronics and power requirements; and 5) Low cost (COGS for permanent equipment: <$2,000) in
comparison to the benchmark technologies (equipment cost: $50,000¿$100,000). With these features, we expect
that once demonstrated, the proposed ExoSOUND technology will not only become a more compact, affordable,
convenient-to-use replacement to the existing exosome-isolation approaches, but also fulfill many unmet needs
in fundamental biomedical research and clinical applications.
