Assistant Professor University of Notre Dame, United States
Introduction: Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) are lipid nanoparticles, with diameters between 50 nm and 150 nm, secreted by most eukaryotic cells. They are promising drug delivery vehicles due to their small size, biocompatibility, low immunogenicity, and reduced toxicity in comparison with synthetic nanoscale formulations such as liposomes, dendrimers, and polymers. However, there remain fundamental challenges to the utilization of sEVs in the clinic: i) drug loading efficiency into sEVs is very limited; ii) the production of sEVs has yet to reach sufficient high throughput for clinical tests or even further development; iii) endowing sEVs with multiple abilities for satisfactory disease targeting, tracking and combinational therapies is highly demanding.
Materials and
Methods: In this work, I will introduce a convergent bioengineered platform enabled by engineered biomimetic materials developed in The Wang Lab at the University of Notre Dame for advancing therapeutic sEVs in future medicine. This platform includes 1) A high-efficiency sEVs drug loading technology with chiral graphene nanoparticles; 2) A high-yield in vitro sEVs production cell culture scaffold with stimulating piezoelectric nanofibers; 3) Engineered hybrid sEVs with biomimetic nanoparticles as a multifunctional targeted delivery system for cancer treatment.
Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: The platform allows loading drugs such as chemotherapeutic drugs and immunotherapeutic agents into sEVs with high efficiency (>60%), compared to traditional methods ( < 30%), biomanufacturing sEVs in high throughput (15 fold increase in production rate), and further engineering sEVs-based drug delivery systems for various diseases with desired functions including targeted delivery, imaging, and multifunctional therapies.
