Recent Advances in Microfluidic-Based Extracellular Vesicle Analysis

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) hold enormous potential in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, benefit from their roles in intercellular signaling, as well as their plentiful presence and stability in body fluids. However, conventional EV isolation methods are labor-intensive, and harvest EVs with low purity and compromised recovery. In addition, the drawbacks, such as limited sensitivity and specificity of traditional EV analysis methods hinder the application of EVs in clinical use. Therefore, it is urgent to develop effective and standardized methods for isolating and detecting EVs. Microfluidics technology is a powerful and rapidly developing technology that has been introduced as a potential solution for the above bottlenecks. It holds the advantages of high integration, short analysis time, low consumption of samples and reagents. In this review, we summarize the traditional techniques alongside microfluidic-based methodologies for the isolation and detection of EVs. We emphasize the separation advantages of microfluidic technology in enhancing EV capture efficiency and precise targeting, while summarizing its analytical role in targeted detection and discussing the significance of EV detection in the tumor microenvironment, providing a direction for achieving automated and high-throughput EV detection in clinical samples.