Surface Engineering of Extracellular Vesicles through Chemical and Biological Strategies

Extracellular vesicles, including exosomes, shuttle proteins and genetic information between cells and are recently regarded as a promising class of nanoparticles for biomedical applications. Collecting exosomes from patients and amplifying the signal from the exosome cargo could enable new liquid biopsies owing to the exosome's strong correlation with disease progression. A promising strategy to develop personalized therapeutic carriers is through surface engineering the exosomes and hijacking their inherent messenger system. However, because of the small size and surface complexity, methods to manipulate exosomes are still in their infancy. The purification, preservation, and engineering of exosomes with high scalability and reproducibility is pivotal for practical applications. By regarding exosomes as a bioderived soft nanoparticle, the amassed knowledge and techniques commonly used in materials chemistry and surface science would contribute to exosome development and exploitation. In this perspective, we first introduce the basics of exosomes (i.e., composition, purification, and analysis), and then we highlight the recent research on surface engineering exosomes from the viewpoint of materials chemistry and discuss possible future directions for the field.