Researchers Prepared New Tools for the Production of Exosome Drug Carriers

Recently, Yang Hui, a researcher at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed a nanofluidic chip technology to achieve high-throughput preparation of exosome drug carriers and experimentally verify the anti-tumor effect of novel exosome drug carriers.

Exosomes are nanoscale particles that can be secreted into the extracellular space or body fluids by almost all cell types, with a diameter of approximately 30–200 nm. As a natural intercellular substance carrier, they achieve intercellular communication through the transfer and transmission of biomolecules and have been used as natural delivery carriers for drug molecules for the treatment of human diseases, with application potential in the field of intelligent drug delivery.

However, the traditional method of loading exogenous substances into exosomes such as electroporation method is too inefficient and easily destroys the integrity and functionality of exosomes, making exosomes face challenges in biomedical applications. To this end, Yang Hui's team proposed a high-throughput chip called "Exosomenanoporator", which can load a variety of exogenous substances into exosomes and obtain a large number of exosome samples loaded with drugs. With the help of nanofluidic chip technology, the characteristics of fluid can be accurately controlled at the nanoscopic scale, realizing the highly controllable preparation conditions of exosome drug carriers. Based on MEMS micro-nano process, nanoscale channels with precise structure are fabricated, and 30,000 modules are operated in parallel, which can improve the preparation efficiency. Through the coupling of mechanical extrusion and fluid shear, nanopores that exist transiently on the surface of exosome membrane and do not destroy the biofilm structure are produced, which promotes the entry of exogenous substance molecules from the surrounding solution into the exosome, thus realizing the atraumatic preparation of exosome drug carriers.

In the study, the clinically approved anti-tumor drug doxorubicin was selected as the validation object, which confirmed that the "exosome nanoperforator" could efficiently load it into the exosome, and the drug-loaded exosome could transport doxorubicin into lung cancer cells and tumor spheres, induce cancer cell death and inhibit tumor sphere growth. The results show that the developed nanoliter chip ensures the activity of drug-containing exosomes and can release the contained drugs without producing immune response, which is an important prerequisite for the clinical application of exosomes drugs.

Researchers are advancing the standardized production of this nanofluidic system. In the future, new strategies based on nanofluidic chip technology to achieve exosome loading are expected to develop into a platform-type tool to load different exogenous substances with biological significance and clinical therapeutic effects into exosomes and get more applications in biological research and cell-free therapeutic method development.

Collected by Creative Biostructure, a world leading biotech company specialized in structural biology. Now scientists at Creative Biostructure have successfully developed exosome/microvesicle products derived from different sources, which have diverse applications in exosome-based research, reflecting the functional status of their parent cells. Its range of products includes exosomes isolated from cancer cell lines, exosomes isolated from stem cell lines, exosomes isolated from immune-related cell lines, exosomes isolated from general cell lines, exosomes isolated from body fluids, fluorescent exosomes/microvesicles, as well as lyophilized microvesicles.