All the planned activities are within three established main actions:
- Action 1. EV quality standards set, including: (1) purification of EVs from bovine milk and Ascaris suum incubation media. These fluids are very attractive “infinite” sources of EVs because they are cheap, widely available, sustainable and ethically compliant and their EVs have biological activity and medical potentiality; (2) set up of methods and workflow for determination of (a) chemical properties and (b) of the biological properties of the purified EVs.
- Action 2. Materials and methods development for efficient purification of nanosized EVs that work under continuous flow. Delivered results include:
(a1) a device able to pre-process the starting source to remove unwanted material that can modifying properties and functions of the EVs;
(a2) a device based on deterministic lateral displacement (eDLD) that separate EVs for size;
(b) the understanding of interactions between EVs and lipid membranes. Results can potentiate the two devices performances, mimicking the interaction with cellular membranes.
- Action 3. Realization of an integrated device (a1+a2) for augmented purification of EVs.
Due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, not all the testing could be replicated as planned, however obtained results gave positive indications regarding feasibility and advantage – in terms of yield, biological properties of the products and costs – of evFOUNDRY device use as a component in large-scale purification processing. This puts the bases for next exploitation of such evFOUNDRY for large-scale EV manufacturing.
The whole consortium has been very active in communicate the project results using different channels to reach the widest audience.
Some of the most important actions regard the publication of more than twenty articles on peer review scientific journals with more than five featured the cover of international journals. The organization of the International Society of Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) workshop “MassivEVs” on EV large-scale production and an intense participation to international meetings with more than sixty contributions.
The involvement in sixteen cluster events with other related European and international projects and the organization/participation to several training workshops on the (or inspired by) the project featured science and technology.
