Invention:
Plant-based extracellular vesicles have features leading to low immunogenicity with innate bioactive agents for targeting and/or treating specific biological effects. They can also be used as carriers with cargo drug from natural or synthetic products with higher bioavailability. The variety of plant categories also provide broad resources for lower cost production. Culture conditions may also be cost effective and so these vesicles are promising new drug delivery systems or could also be carrying biomarkers for targeted deliveries. Use in diagnostics, therapies, CBRN medical countermeasures but also in consumer products for cosmetics or food products are other foreseen embodiments.
Background:
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are nano-size lipid bilayer particles playing the role of cell-to-cell communication system in multicellular organisms through the bioactive cargo they carry such as protein, small regulatory RNA, or lipids in addition to fragments of DNA. Recently, EVs, and exosomes have drawn attention for their therapeutic potential in disease such as neurological disorder or cancer.
Interestingly, EVs demonstrated important biological functions associated with radiation damage response, such as the reduction of pro-inflammatory cytokines levels and promotion of anti-inflammatory cytokines, the alleviation of oxidative stress, anti-apoptosis effect and proliferation stimulation. Thus, these EVs are investigated as potential radiation medical countermeasures (MCMs) for radiation-induced skin, lung, and bone injuries.
However, the role of EVs in clinic is still subject to several technical and biological challenges that include the production of sufficient quantities, the risk of mycoplasma and other microbial contamination or their high heterogeneity in composition, size, subpopulations that limit therapeutic applications. Therefore, to overcome such challenges, recent studies have explored the use of EVs derived from vegetal kingdom (pEVs). The invention here explores the ways in which plant-based EVs can be utilized for enhancing the aforementioned applications.
Applications:
- Diagnostics
- Therapies
- Food products
- Cosmetics
Advantages:
- Higher bioavailability
- Cost effective
- Broad resources
