Engineering extracellular vesicles by nanoneedle-mediated endocytic modulation.

Dr. Ciro Chiappini (primary)
Centre for Craniofacial and Regenerative Biology
King's College London
Professor Khuloud Al-Jamal (secondary)
Institute of Pharmaceutical Science
King's College London

Abstract

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) play an important yet poorly understood role for intracellular communication. They are attracting growing interest as effective nanodelivery platforms that reduce toxicity and improve targeting. Yet, the limited ability to engineer their payload composition hampers the potential of EVs as cell-instructive elements for cell biology, tissue engineering and oncotherapy. Here we engineer the payloads of EVs by leveraging the upregulation of endocytosis induced by nanoneedles. Combining our expertise in drug delivery with that in the isolation, formulation and characterisation of EV we aim to develop a step-changing strategy to formulate nanoparticle-enriched EVs for delivery of biologicals.


References

I. M. Bjørge et al. Extracellular vesicles, exosomes and shedding vesicles in regenerative medicine – a new paradigm for tissue repair, Biomater. Sci. 6, 60-78 (2018)
C. Chiappini et al. Biodegradable silicon nanoneedles delivering nucleic acids intracellularly induce localized in vivo neovascularization, Nature Materials 14, 532-539 (2015).
C. Chiappini et al. Biodegradable nanoneedles for localized delivery of nanoparticles in vivo: exploring the biointerface, ACS Nano 9, 5500-5509 (2015).
K.T. Al-Jamal et al. Engineering Exosomes with Encapsulation of siRNA for Optical Imaging in Cancer Models in vitro and in vivo: A Versatile Approach. In preparation.
K.T. Al-Jamal et al. Membrane radiolabelling of exosomes for comparative biodistribution analysis in immunocompetent and immunodeficient mice – a novel and universal approach. In preparation.
P. Bergese et al. Biogenic Supported Lipid Bilayers from Nanosized Extracellular Vesicles Adv. Biosyst. 2 1700200 (2018)


BBSRC Area
Genes, development and STEM* approaches to biology
Area of Biology
Cell BiologyChemical Biology
Techniques & Approaches
ChemistryEngineeringImage ProcessingMicroscopy / ElectrophysiologyMolecular Biology