The tears you shed at the doctor’s clinic could one day be put to good use, according to a new study.

An exosome extraction and filtering technique has been reported in the journal ACS Nano, which allows researchers to swiftly evaluate exosomes for disease biomarkers.

The platform, called iTEARS, could make molecular diagnoses of many diseases and conditions faster, less invasive, and more accurate than relying only on symptoms.

Disease diagnosis usually depends on evaluating a patient’s symptoms, which can be difficult to observe in the beginning or inaccurately reported.

Finding molecular clues in patient samples, like specific proteins or genes from structures called exosomes, could help doctors make more accurate diagnoses.

But the current ways to get exosomes out of these samples require a lot of long, complicated steps or a lot of sample volume.

Tears are a good source of fluid since they may be swiftly and painlessly collected, albeit only a small amount can be harvested at a time.

So, Luke Lee, Fei Liu, and their colleagues wondered if a nanomembrane system they had made to isolate exosomes from urine and plasma could be used to quickly get these vesicles from tears and then look for biomarkers of disease in them.

To address the modest volume of tears, the team made modifications to their initial method.

By filtering tear solutions across nanoporous membranes with an oscillating pressure flow to prevent clogging, the new method, known as “Incorporated Tear Exosomes Analysis via Rapid-isolation System” (iTEARS), isolated exosomes in under 5 minutes.

While still on the device, proteins from the exosomes could be labeled with fluorescent probes and then transferred to further devices for additional examination. The exosomes’ nucleic acids were also removed and studied.

Based on a proteomic analysis of the retrieved proteins, the researchers were able to distinguish between healthy controls and patients with various kinds of dry eye illness.

Similar to this, iTEARS allowed researchers to spot changes in microRNAs between patients with diabetic retinopathy and those who did not, indicating that the system may aid in monitoring the course of the disease.

According to the research team, using only tears could result in a molecular diagnostic that is more accurate, quicker, and less invasive.

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