#exosome

A review sketching a blueprint for immuno-exosomes in hepatocellular carcinoma. Yet it names neither the target antigen nor any approved comparator drug. The authors themselves call it speculative.

Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) from human bone marrow MSCs, delivered to spinal cord–injured rats either as daily injections or as a continuous infusion from an osmotic pump. At the same total dose of 9.2 μg, only the group infused continuously for six days climbed to a BBB score of 12.9±0.9, while the same amount split into six injections stalled at 8.6±0.9. Doubling the injected dose changed nothing against the three-day schedule, and collagen 1 at the lesion was also significantly lower under continuous infusion than under injections of the same total amount. Dr. Exotaro reads a preclinical rat study.

Extracted wisdom teeth and baby teeth—this paper takes on spinal cord injury with exosomes from stem cells harvested from teeth that would normally be thrown away. The authors compared 3 kinds of stem cells on the same footing and chose dental pulp, narrowed 727 proteins down to a candidate called PSMD1, a “part of the proteasome,” and report that it tipped microglia toward the M2 side. But the treatment was tried only in cultured cells and mice. Dr. Exotaro reads through this preclinical study.

A review that takes on insulin resistance with gene-modified MSC exosomes loaded with miR-21 and SIRT3. But it contains not a single experiment by the authors themselves, prints not one p-value, dose, or n, and cites not one clinical trial targeting insulin resistance in humans. Dr. Exotaro reads through a review that stays preclinical.

We read a review that promotes the "young" mesenchymal stem cells harvested from the umbilical cord jelly thrown away at every birth, along with their secreted products, as the trump card of post-stroke regenerative medicine. There are no new data, and no literature search procedure is written down. And among its 285 references, there was not a single clinical trial that gave stroke patients material explicitly identified as Wharton's jelly-derived.

IL-10, the cytokine that calms inflammation, never quite became a drug: it is unstable and clears from the body fast. A Michigan State University team harvested extracellular vesicles from cells made to overexpress IL-10 with minicircle DNA, and shows they are more stable than recombinant IL-10 and quiet inflammatory macrophages. But naïve vesicles, with no IL-10 gene introduced, worked too. Every experiment is in cultured cells.

MSC-derived extracellular vesicles are biocompatible, low-immunogenicity 'natural nanocapsules.' This review maps six strategies to engineer them into drug carriers and their clinical safety data.