Engineered exosomes: a transformative therapeutic modality

Exploiting the therapeutic use of exosomes could revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry, by addressing major challenges such as enabling successful drug delivery to multiple tissues in a way that has a low immunogenicity profile and that allows repeat dosing. Exosomes are small, lipid-bound vesicles released by most if not all cell types. They play an array of biological roles and can carry a variety of cargo, which can be delivered into the cytoplasm of recipient cells. As ‘nature’s delivery vehicle’ they can be engineered to carry different kinds of therapeutic cargo, from RNA to proteins and even viruses. At Evox, we are addressing many of the challenges of harnessing exosomes as therapeutics by optimizing them to maximize loading of a range of drug cargoes, by scaling up the consistent manufacturing of these exosomes, and by also engineering exosomes to specifically target cell types and surmount normally restricted biological and physiological barriers.