Small Particle technology
Research related to extracellular vesicles (EVs) is of increasing importance; however, the tools to enumerate, quantify and interrogate these tantalizing small particles has not met the challenge. In the field of drugs of abuse, there is clear and convincing evidence that EVs play a significant role, and it is known certain drugs such as cocaine induce a release of EVs. There are now numerous studies showing that EVs are involved in communication between neuronal cells. EVs are implicated in drug transport across the blood-brain barrier possibly impacting a variety of signaling mechanism. The most common thread in the EVs literature reflects fundamental problems: EVs are hard to isolate, difficult to identify, challenging to quantitate, and extracting functional features is time consuming and costly. Even a basic analysis to determine the mere presence of EVs in plasma, CSF, or cell culture media requires a significant amount of time and expensive equipment. The subsequent evaluation of the EVs’ phenotype is even more difficult. EVs are ranging from 10 to 150 nm – far below the diffraction limit of traditional optical systems and therefore too small to resolve without the aid of electron microscopy. We are developing a technology that can examine a sample from a patient and within a few minutes determine (1) presence of EVs, (2) the distribution of the EVs’ sizes (3) and EVs’ origin/phenotypes, providing a great benefit to the researcher answering a vast unmet need in the field. No current methods can evaluate a single EV particle with certainty, simultaneously measure attached fluorescence tags, and provide an absolute quantitation of EVs population in ~30 minutes.