The field of regenerative medicine is receiving significant interest with the objective of restoring damaged tissues to health using biological products, as well as influencing age-related decay.

The use of pluripotent stem cells has been studied for some years now with the hope of nurturing their undifferentiated state into specific cell types reflecting the target tissues requiring repair. Another approach has been to harness the biological properties of exosomes. Exosomes are nano-sized biovesicles released by all nucleated cells into surrounding body fluids upon fusion of tiny intracellular multivesicular bodies and the plasma membrane.

These small vesicles, measuring between 40 and 160 nanometers, were first identified in the late 1980s and initially were proposed as cellular waste resulting from cell damage or by-products of cell homeostasis with little or no effect on neighboring cells. This initial simple interpretation of their function has now been supplanted by new insights into their physiological roles. Exosomes carry a complex cargo of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids and are now recognized as functional vesicles capable of delivering very important cargoes of information to target cells they encounter. This chemical messaging may ultimately reprogram the recipient cells remotely from their release and represent a novel mode of intercellular communication as well as playing a major role in many cellular processes such as immune response, signal transduction, and antigen presentation.

It is likely that the cargo of exosomes may differ significantly depending upon the function of the originating cell type and its current physiological state, including states of transformation, differentiation, stimulation, or stress.

A current line of study aims to determine whether active exosome cargo may offer prognostic information on a range of diseases such as chronic inflammation, cardiovascular and renal disease, neurodegenerative diseases, lipid metabolic disease, and tumors. Additionally, as exosomes are not immunogenic, they are being examined for their potential to actively deliver biological therapeutics across different biological barriers to target cells, including across the blood-brain barrier.

References:

Dr. Jeffrey Gross:www.ReCELLebrate.com

Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine: From Molecular Biology to Clinical Applications. Academic Press. 2021.

Exosomes in Cell-to-Cell Communication and Regenerative Medicine. Theranostics. 2020.www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The Role of Exosomes in Regenerative Medicine and Tissue Engineering. Frontiers in Bioengineering. 2019.www.frontiersin.org