Project: Exosomes Isolation Tool with nanofluidic concentration device

Acronym	EXIT (Reference Number: EURONANOMED2017-056)
Duration	01/04/2018
Project Topic	Around 2 million patients in Europe, Japan and the US are annually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). At present, there is no effective therapy. There is an urgency to improve our understanding of the early pathogenesis of AD. Evidence is growing that transcriptomic, metabolic and immunologic changes are preceding the amyloid and tau pathology characterizing AD. One of the major hurdles hampering progression of research is that there is a paucity of brain tissue in early stages of disease. Recently exosomes have gained a significant interest in the research community due to their ability to pass the blood-brain barrier. The presence of these nanoparticles in body fluids such as blood, urine and saliva make them an appealing resource for non-invasive etiologic and diagnostic research that can be translated into preventive and therapeutic interventions. Technology for precise, high-throughput isolation of exosomes from complex body fluids is pre-requisite, but is currently lacking. The aim of this project is to develop a beyond the state-of-the art nanotechnology driven analytical platform for isolation of exosomes and use this platform to investigate metabolic, proteomic, immunologic and transcriptional changes in AD. Our novel electrodriven separation and fractionation method ? nanochannel induced ion depletion zone isotachophoresis ? will be employed for fully controllable isolation of exosomes and their use for biomarker discovery in Alzheimer’s disease. EXIT will integrate nanotechnology, transcriptomics, genetics and metabolomics with large existing EU biobanks, enabling to investigate large sample cohorts of blood and paired cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood. Within EXIT nanotechnologists, analytical chemists, biologists, geneticists, epidemiologists and clinicians will work together to make the long-awaited breakthrough in exosome isolation and rapidly translate this breakthrough into etiologic, preventive and therapeutic applications.
Network	EuroNanoMed III
Call	Joint Transnational Call for Proposals (2017) for “European Innovative Research & Technological Development Projects in Nanomedicine”

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Leiden University	Coordinator	Netherlands
2	SINTEF	Partner	Norway
3	HansaBioMed Life Sciences	Partner	Estonia
4	Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam	Partner	Netherlands
5	Fundació ACE. Institut Català de Neurociències Aplicades	Partner	Spain