Background overview
The Finnish Red Cross Blood Service is advancing research and development around extracellular vesicles (EVs)—nanoscale particles that carry proteins, RNA, lipids and other biomolecules. EVs have strong potential in diagnostics and, in the future, therapeutic applications, but their complexity makes reliable purification and quality control essential.
Challenge
Producing EVs with high purity and good yield is challenging, especially for blood-derived samples where “look-alike” particles such as lipoproteins can complicate separation. Traditional characterization often requires multiple techniques and can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and sample-demanding—creating slow feedback loops in process development and QC.
Solution
The Finnish Red Cross Blood Service evaluated Timegated® Raman spectroscopy as a fast, non-destructive method to gain molecular-level insight into EV composition. Using the Timegated® Raman spectrometer PicoRaman M3, the team explored ways to support process monitoring and QC with minimal sample handling—including an inline-style setup connected to purification workflows (e.g. FPLC) to follow compositional changes during processing.
— Dr. Saara Laitinen, Finnish Red Cross Blood Service
Results
The project produced promising early results, demonstrating:
- Fast measurements with good signal quality
- The ability to highlight biochemical differences between EV samples
- Clear visibility of lipoproteins, supporting impurity/mixture assessment in blood-derived contexts
- A practical path toward reducing reliance on multiple, laborious assays by extracting richer information from fewer measurements