Extracellular Vesicles: “Stealth Transport Aircrafts” for Drugs

Abstract

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) can deliver many types of drugs with their natural source material transport properties, inherent long-term blood circulation capabilities and excellent biocompatibility, and have great potential in the field of drug carrier. Modification of the content and surface of EVs according to the purpose of treatment has become a research focus to improve the drug load and the targeting of EVs. EVs can maximize the stability of the drugs, prevent immune clearance and achieve accurate delivery. Therefore, EVs can be described as \" stealth transport aircrafts \" for drugs. This chapter will respectively introduce the application of natural EVs as cell substitutes in cell therapy and engineered EVs as carriers of nucleic acids, proteins, small molecule drugs and therapeutic viral particles in disease treatment. It will also explain the drug loading and modification strategies of EVs, the source and characteristics of EVs. In addition, the commercialization progress of EVs drugs will be mentioned here, and the problems in their applications will be discussed in conjunction with the application of EVs in the treatment of COVID-19.

Current Treatments and New Possible Complementary Therapies for Epithelial Ovarian Cancer

“…They are continuously produced and released by cells and contain proteins, messenger RNA, and miRs that can be transferred to another cell and become functional in the new location [ 281 ]. EVs play an important role in cancer diagnosis [ 282 ] or prognosis [ 283 ] and drug resistance [ 284 ] and it is proposed that they could be used as a delivery vehicle of chemotherapeutics [ 285 ]. Two main kinds of EVs are produced to carrier and deliver anti-tumoral therapies: EVs-based semisynthetic nanoparticles and EVs mimetic nanoparticles.…”

Extracellular Vesicles in Cardiovascular Diseases: Diagnosis and Therapy

“…In the cardiac environment, especially for systemically administered EVs, the volume of EVs is critical relative to the successfully penetration into the heart tissue. So that EVs can be effectively absorbed by the relevant cell types ( Liu et al, 2020 ).…”