Title: Extracellular Vesicle Therapeutics
Speaker: Dr. Illarion V. Turko, Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research, NIST
Abstract:
All cell types have the capability to release a wide variety of membrane vesicles that are collectively designed extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs mediate intercellular communication and transmit specific information from their cell of origin to their target cells. As a result of this property, EVs may serve as a drug delivering system with a strictly site-specific delivery of drug without off target side effects. Not surprisingly, in the last decade, EVs have emerged as a promising new type of targeted therapeutics. However, in comparison to existing small molecule and protein therapeutics, the EVs have much higher level of complexity and current uncertainty in a broad understanding of their functional and regulatory features has made difficult the translation from basic science to patient care.
The most challenging aspect of EVs studies is their diversity. There are multiple EVs subtypes with different biogenesis, cargo, and physicochemical properties. Furthermore, EVs are isolated from different body fluids and in vitro cell culture media using a variety of general techniques, which do not well separate subtypes of EVs and typically result in partially purified preparations of EVs contaminated by non-vesicular components. There is an urgent need in standardization in EVs research on all levels, including special attention to the methods of isolation. In the present talk, we capitalized on mass spectrometry based absolute protein quantitation, and the development of a proteomic tool box to assess the efficiency of EVs isolation will be presented. The pilot study on using flow cytometry to isolate EVs will be presented as well.
