Abstract

Engineering Liquid Biopsy: From Automated Exosome Analysis to Hand-Powered Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Yoon-Kyoung Cho, Professor and Dean, UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology)

Liquid biopsy is transforming precision medicine by enabling minimally invasive access to circulating biomarkers for disease detection and monitoring. Among these biomarkers, extracellular vesicles (EVs) offer exceptional promise due to their molecular richness and stability. However, widespread clinical and global deployment of liquid biopsy technologies remains limited by challenges in sensitivity, automation, cost, and accessibility.

In this talk, I will present our engineering approach based on centrifugal microfluidics to address these challenges across diverse clinical settings, spanning fully automated laboratory systems to hand-powered point-of-care diagnostics. First, I will describe our lab-on-a-disc platforms for high-performance EV analysis, which enable rapid and automated isolation of nanoscale EVs from biological fluids. Building on this foundation, I will introduce a digital EV profiling strategy that allows direct, amplification-free detection of tumor-derived EV RNAs from unprocessed plasma, substantially improving sensitivity for clinically relevant mutations and treatment monitoring. I will then expand beyond centralized laboratories to introduce hand-powered centrifugal diagnostic tools designed for extreme point-of-care environments. These platforms harness manual rotation to perform bacterial enrichment and nanoplasmonic sensing, enabling rapid, electricity-free identification of infectious pathogens with high precision. Together, these technologies illustrate how microfluidic engineering can unify advanced molecular diagnostics with scalable, low-cost solutions, accelerating the translation of liquid biopsy and precision diagnostics from the laboratory to real-world clinical and global health applications.