As in the past, this year’s International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV 2016) annual meeting featured a pre-meeting education day to bring interested parties up to speed on extracellular vesicles (EVs), particularly on key recent developments. For the first time, however, the full-day effort was divided into two parallel sessions: “Novel Developments of Isolation and Characterization of Extracellular Vesicles” and “Extracellular Vesicle Therapeutics.” The two tracks, coupled with the outstanding attendance by 400 scientists and students on May 3, 2016, are yet another indication of the tremendous recent growth of the EV field. The Education Day was held at the De Doelen International Congress Center in the heart of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and this venue will also be the site for the ISEV 2016 meeting running from Wednesday, May 4- Saturday, May 7. An attendance of over 800 is expected for the ISEV 2016 meeting. The education session on novel development of isolation and characterization of EVs, began, perhaps appropriately, with a discussion by Cecilia Lasser on a highly impressive educational tool that will become available to everyone a little later in May. The tool is a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on EVs. The online course will seek to provide a highly useful informative resource with the basics of EVS described in presentations by world leaders in the field. Among the subjects covered initially will be a historical introduction, presence of EVs in bodily fluids, a description of the biogenesis of EVs, different methods of isolation, and different approaches to characterization and quantification. When launched later in May, the MOOC can be accessed at the following URL: https://www.coursera.org.Login Or Register To Read Full Story