Biobanking of Exosomes in the Era of Precision Medicine

The emergence of personalized medicine demands high-quality human biospecimens with appropriate clinical annotation, especially in complex diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, and metabolic alterations in which specimen heterogeneity and individual responses often complicate the development of precision therapeutic programs. In the growing field of extracellular vesicles (EVs) research, exosomes (EXOs)-a particular type of EVs-have been proposed as an advantageous diagnostic tool, as effective delivery vehicles and as therapeutic targets. However, the lack of consensus on isolation methods and rigorous criteria to characterize them puts the term EXO into question at the time that might explain some of the controversial results found in the literature. A lack of response in the biobank network to warrant standard optimized procedures for the isolation, characterization, and storage of EXOs will undoubtedly lead to a waste of resources and failure. There is increasing importance of EXOs for the clinic, especially in the cancer field, and initiatives must be taken to improve current isolation procedures, classification criteria, and storage conditions of EXOs. Biobank platforms face technological demands for the incorporation of EXOs and other extracellular vesicle fractions as valuable biospecimens for research.

Strategy proposed for the identification of EXOs (exosomes) pan (general) and specific surface markers to serve as classification and functional subtyping criteria. GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices); preps (preparations); -OMICs (proteomic, lipidomic and transcriptomic analysis).