Exosomes are attractive vehicles for drug delivery due to their natural ability to carry proteins, RNA and small molecules into cells. Getting the desired cargo into an exosome, however, is more difficult, and methods for exosome loading are often low-throughput and can cause damage to the vesicles and their contents. Researchers from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a new nanofluidic device that could greatly increase the throughput of exosome cargo loading while also minimizing damage.
The device, called the “exosome nanoporator” (ENP), contains 30,000 nanochannels with precise geometries to load many exosomes in parallel. As exosomes flow through the channels, transient nanopores are created in their membranes through mechanical compression and fluid shear, allowing the cargo in the surrounding solution to safely enter the vesicle. The nanofluidic technology allows the preparation conditions to be highly controlled, ensuring efficient and nondestructive loading.
The researchers used the ENP to load the chemotherapeutic antitumor drug doxorubicin hydrochloride and confirmed the device could efficiently load the drug into the exosomes. These ENP-treated exosomes containing the cargo were then tested in human cancer cells to determine their ability to deliver the drug effectively. The results were published in the journal Small.
“We find that the exosomes treated by the ENP can deliver their drug cargos to human non-small cell lung cancer cells and induce cell death. This indicates potential opportunities of the device for developing new exosome-based delivery vehicles for medical and biological applications,” said corresponding author Hui Yang.
This new nanofluidics-based strategy is expected to be developed into a platform for loading different exogenous substances of biological and clinical significance into exosomes.
Photo: Illustration of exosomes during cell-to-cell communication. Credit: National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Flickr Commons, CC BY-NC 2.0, cropped from original.