Table 1.

Advantages and drawbacks of EV isolation approaches.

EV Isolation Approach	Advantages	Disadvantages
Ultracentrifugation (UC)	Simple to use, needs minimal technical experience, cost-effective (one ultracentrifuge machine for long-term usage), and requires little or no sample preparation [43]	Time-consuming, structural deterioration, and co-isolation of lipoproteins [28,54,66,67]
Ultrafiltration (UF)	Takes less time and effort [53] andgenerates very pure exosomes [68]	Employs power, which could result in a lack of exosomes due to membrane rupture and impurity of separated exosomes [69,70], andadherent particles also clog pores, resulting in a decrease in flow and elution performance [71]
Size-exclusion chromatography (SEC)	Fast, convenient, and inexpensive [54]	This method cannot distinguish between exosomes and similar-sized microvesicles [38]
Poly-ethylene glycol (PEG)-based precipitation	Handles multiple samples at once with convenience, speed, and relatively low costs without destroying the exosomes [58]	Other compounds such as protein can precipitate, contaminating the exosome [53,72]
Immunoaffinity capture	Shortens exosome separation periods and increases exosome purity [45,59]	Costly, ineffective, and not recommended for large-scale exosome separation [45,59]
Microfluidics	Effective and quick processing, and high pureness of exosome isolation [49]	Highly complicated and costly [49]
Tangential flow filtration	Fast and simple method [73]	The existence of nanoparticles of similar sizes to exosomes can be a limitation [73,74]