
The first joint ASEMV (American Society for Exosomes and Microvesicles) / AAEV (American Association for Extracellular Vesicles) began Thursday (September 29) evening at Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. This first meeting session featured presentations by four leaders in the field and was chaired by Michael Graner, PhD, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Research Director of the Neurosurgery Neural Tissue Bank at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr. Graner gave a brief history of ASEMV annual meetings in the past and looked forward to a merging of the two associations ASEMV/AAEV. He then turned the podium over to Nihan Altan—Bonnet, PhD, Senior Investigator and Head of the Laboratory of Host-Pathogen Dynamics at the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for a fascinating discussion of her group’s work on the interactions of extracellular vesicles (EVs) and viruses. Among her exciting points was that poliovirus is transmitted from cell to cell by EVs that carry multiple copies of the virus (approximately 20 copies). These multi-virus EVs were found to be much more infectious than EVs carrying just a single virus. Dr. Bonnet’s talk was titled “A New Infectious Unit: Extracellular Vesicles Carrying Virus Populations.”