Programming Synthetic Exosomes to Optimize Wound Healing & Formation of New Blood Vessels: Scientists Create Synthetic Exosomes with Natural Functionalities and Present Their Therapeutic Application

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues at the DWI Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials in Aachen, Germany, have engineered synthetic exosomes that regulate cellular signaling during wound closure. The synthetic structures are built to resemble naturally occurring extracellular vesicles (EVs) [Editor’s Note: Exosomes are a subset of EVs] that play a fundamental role in communication between cells during various processes in our body. The scientist uncovered key mechanisms to regulate and aid wound healing and the formation of new blood vessels. For this, they designed and built programmable fully-synthetic EVs from scratch rather than isolating natural EVs from cells. Inspired by the function of their natural blue prints, the scientists successfully demonstrate for the first time that fully-synthetic exosomes with therapeutic functionality can be constructed. The new work was reported online on September 3, 2021 in Science Advances. The open-access article is titled “Bottom-Up Assembly of Biomedical Relevant Fully Synthetic Extracellular Vesicles.”