生物纳米膜结构exosome在疾病治疗中的研究进展

Exosomes are membrane-bound vesicles with the size of 30-100 nm, which can be shed from a variety of cells. Exosomes are important natural messengers involving in cellular communication by carrying mRNA, microRNA and protein. The discovery of exosomes can be dated back to four decades ago and they become fast-extending field recently with further understanding of their biogenesis and the mechanism of cellular transfer. It has been shown that exosomes are not only involved in the metastasis of tumors and the presentation of antigens in antigen-presenting cells but also can be used as diagnostic or prognostic markers for the progression of various diseases. Notably, exosomes show huge potential in drug delivery as biological nanoparticles and provide a novel strategy for gene therapy. Previously our group genetically modified immature dendritic cell-derived exosomes by anchoring a neuron-specific peptide on the surface of exosomes, by which we could confer the targeting property to exosomes. We demonstrated that genetically modified exosomes could successfully cross blood-brain barrier and deliver the cargo to targeted neurons and mediate the targeted gene knock-down. Furthermore, exosomes have been extensively utilized for immunotherapy in various tumors e.g. melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer and other diseases. In this review, we will focus on the recent development of exosomes in the field of gene therapy and immunotherapy. Moreover, we would like to discuss further about the potential and limitation of exosomes as a novel drug delivery system.