Health Nanotechnology is calling for submissions to our Collection on Engineered extracellular vesicles. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) possess remarkable potential for drug delivery. However, the loading of drug molecules into EVs following their isolation and purification (known as 'post-production' or ‘exogenous' loading) without compromising their natural ability to overcome biological barriers (hence their drug delivery potential) remains one of the key challenges in unlocking this potential. This is particularly the case when considering macromolecular drugs (e.g. peptides, therapeutic proteins and nucleic acid-based therapeutics). A number of post-production drug loading strategies have been reported, but these suffer from issues such as poor drug loading. The fusion of EVs with synthetic drug delivery systems, such as liposomes, to create hybrid EVs is becoming an increasingly promising strategy to overcome the poor loading of macromolecular drugs into EVs and improve their drug delivery potential, e.g. by imparting beneficial properties of the synthetic vector (e.g. endosomal escape) to the resulting hybrid EVs. This Collection invites original research articles and reviews on the topic of EV hybrids, engineered for the purpose to improve the drug delivery potential of EVs.
List of topics:
• Post-production loading techniques for engineered EVs
• Overcoming biological barriers for effective drug delivery with engineered EVs
• Development and application of macromolecular drugs using EVs
• Hybrid EVs for targeted drug delivery
• Therapeutic proteins and nucleic acid-based therapeutics using EVs
• Strategies for endosomal escape with engineered EVs
• Biodistribution of engineered EVs and methods to analyze their in vivo targeting efficacy.
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