Hydrogel-Based Technology Isolates Extracellular Vesicles for Early Disease Diagnosis

However, traditional EV-isolation methods rely on ultracentrifugation, which requires expensive equipment, complex preprocessing, and low throughput — barriers that limit broader clinical and industrial use. Researchers have now developed a frozen-hydrogel technology that rapidly isolates EVs from multiple biofluids without specialized instruments.

The technology was developed by researchers at Korea University (Seoul, South Korea) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, Seoul, South Korea) by freezing a hydrogel material and curing it with light, forming a three-dimensional microporous network with pore sizes of about 400 nanometers — a structure previously considered unattainable. This porous hydrogel selectively captures permeable EVs while allowing other components to pass through, enabling efficient isolation without pretreatment.

The approach eliminates the need for ultracentrifugation and works on a wide range of biofluids. In their study, the hydrogel isolated EVs rapidly from blood, urine, saliva, milk, cell culture media, and ascites from gastric cancer patients. The method was validated as a high-efficiency, accessible, and easy-to-use solution that does not require costly machinery or operator training. The results, published in Nature Nanotechnology, suggest that the technology can reliably obtain high-purity EVs suitable for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

Practical applications include early disease detection, monitoring, and personalized treatment across cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and metabolic diseases. The ease of use and scalability also position the platform to support major bioindustry sectors such as precision medicine, new drug development, and in vitro diagnostics.

“In the future, researchers and companies will be able to obtain high-purity EVs through a simple process that does not require complex equipment or training, and the new technology will provide a practical foundation for a range of high-value-added bioindustries,” said Korea University Professor Choi Nak-won, PhD.

“Our new technology has overcome the major limitations of the existing EV isolation methods, and we have demonstrated that the new technology has advantages in terms of its efficiency, accessibility, mass processing and user customization,” added KIST senior researcher Kang Ji-yoon, PhD.

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