Title: Engineering of extracellular vesicles for nanomedicine applications
Abstract:
The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries need ever more performing, safe and economical solutions for both diagnostic and therapeutic applications including anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antitumor remedies, but also nutraceutical and cosmeceutical preparations. Since many oral, nasal, transdermal and injectable remedies on the market are not available in the ideal formulation, nanotechnologies are making an impressive contribution to the development of modern pharmaceutical solutions that can also be designed for the needs of individual customers or patients. Medications containing drug molecules, nucleic acids, proteins and nanoparticles need more customized loading and carrying strategies able to enhance their biostability and therapeutic effect while avoiding side effects and non-compliance with established treatments. Among the various drug carriers, nanoparticles, hydrogels and foams, the lipid nano vesicular ones successfully support clinical applications approaching such problems as insolubility, biodegradation, and difficulty in overcoming the skin and biological barriers such as the blood–brain and placental ones.In the broad category of lipid-based nano vesicular systems, both of biological or synthetic origin, liposomes, niosomes, proniosomes, ethosomes, transferases, pharmacophores, ufasomes, phytosomes, catanionic vesicles and extracellular vesicles (EVs) are counted. Undoubtedly the most heterogeneous and versatile lipid vesicles are the EVs since they are ubiquitarian and can be isolated both from healthy and tumoral cells culture media and from all the major biological fluid such as urine, plasma, saliva, amniotic and cerebrospinal fluid and semen. As cell-derived vesicles, the EVs, coming from both plant and human eukaryotic cells, have been successfully used for drug delivery applications since their membrane is characterized by biological moieties related to their parental cells, able to direct specific homing or targeting phenomena. The EVs, as the key physio-pathological intracellular mediators, are indeed able to transport nucleic acids, proteins, and other biological molecules resulting in excellent candidates for post-isolation drug delivery load and engineering nanotechnological modifications
Audience Take Away Notes
- The contents of the presentation will be able to provide the audience with the necessary tools to understand the needs of clinics and pharmacologists assisting them by designing and producing diagnostic and treatment tools to be applied in nanomedicine
- The topics covered during the presentation will provide not only updated knowledge to biotechnologists engaged in research and teaching but also to those of pharmaceutical companies and big pharma to produce new drugs or reposition some existing ones
- Among the contents presented in the talk, a patent was presented that will certainly make it much easier for many colleagues to load a wide range of active pharmaceutical ingredients into EVs carriers
