Hijacking The Messenger

Understanding Why Exosomes Are Attracting Significant Investment And Partnering Attention

Recent excitement around exosomes underscores their potential to solve drug delivery challenges that have limited the power and applicability of the biopharma industry’s growing arsenal of therapeutic modalities. 

Exosomes
Exosomes may prove to be potent therapies and might solve some of the thorniest delivery problems limiting biopharma's most promising therapeutic modalities • Source: Shutterstock

Exosomes have evolved over millennia to deliver macromolecules in their native, active forms from one cell or one tissue to another. The small lipid-membraned sacs are filled with a soup of nucleic acids and proteins: messages, signals or instructions that emerge from one cell to journey to a nearby or distant destination. Now a handful of biotech companies are repurposing exosomes as off-the-shelf treatments for various diseases, and engineering them using ligands or antibodies to route them to various tissues in the body. These exosomes can be decorated or filled, Trojan-horse style, with anything from traditional small molecules to biologics to various flavors of oligonucleotide, and sent off to hit membrane-based or even intracellular targets.

Exosomes may prove to be potent therapies – and they might solve some of the thorniest delivery problems that have...

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