exosome extraction using aqueous two-phase system, a simple and cost-effective method

Aim and background: nowadays, medical knowledge is moving towards personalized medicinein,in wich attemps made to improve and increase the effectiveness of medicine and treatment for patients, as well as to reduce the side effects of treatment processes. there are multiple methods to achieve personolized medicine and its goals wich among them nanomedicine and nanodrugdelivery are spotlighted in researches. using pharmaceutical nanocarriers in order to reduce the side effects of some drugs indicated in treatment of cancer and also for new gene therapy methods has been studied in the last few decades. using these nanocarriers could be resulted in targeted and more effective pharmacotherapy. in recent years, special attention has been paid to exosomes and its unknown potential as biocompatible nanocarriers, which in invivo studies showed much less side effects than other external nanocarriers. one of the challenges to study exosomes is extracting these particles and high cost of this process. this study attempt to propose a protocol to extract exosomes from cell culture medium while being economical and having good efficiency.methods: briefly, supernatant obtained from cell culture medium after passing through a 0.45µm filter, was added to the biphasic aqueous system of polyethylene glycol-dextran at a ratio of one to one, and after centrifugation, 70% of the upper phase of the solution was removed and replaced by upper phase of washing solution, these 3 steps repeated twice. then exosome confirming tests were done using flow cytometry markers, dls and sem.results and discussion: result of flow cytometry for exosome related markers -cd9 and cd63- to confirm exosomes was positive. size of exosomes as membrane vesicles is 100-200 nm, which findings on dls and sem showed that particles to be less than 200 nm.conclusion: according to the acceptable results, we can say exosome extraction using this protocol was successful and this method can be used in exosome related studies in acceptable quality and much less cost in comparition to other methods e.g. ultracentrifuge.