Extracellular Vesicles in Regenerative Medicine: Isolation, Characterisation, and Therapeutic Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are nanoscale particles secreted by almost all cell types to facilitate intercellular communication, acting as carriers for a variety of biologically active signalling molecules, including nucleic acids, proteins, enzymes, and lipids. The use of EVs as therapeutics in regenerative medicine presents several advantages over direct cell transplantaion, such as low immunogenicity, ease of storage, and minimal safety concerns compared those that are normally associated with injecting live cells (e.g., emboli formation from intravenous infusion, uncontrolled pathological transformation). EVs and their subtypes (e.g., exosomes, microvesicles) derived from various types of stem cell and specialised cell have been increasingly used in regenerative medicine applications, including, but not limited to, the heart and blood vessels, kidney, liver, lung, skin, bones and joints, neural tissue, and reproductive tissue. For instance, EVs derived from mesenchymal stem cells have been shown to exert similar anti-inflammatory and pro-regenerative effects to the parent cells, with the ability to improve healing in a variety of tissues. The development of EVs as the next-generation therapeutics for regenerative medicine has progressed rapidly in recent years, together with the isolation and characterisation techniques that are associated with such developments.

This Special Issue on “Extracellular Vesicles in Regenerative Medicine” aims to showcase innovative advances in the development of EVs as therapeutics in regenerative medicine. Topics include, but are not limited to: 

• Development of new methods or processes for isolating and characterising EVs from a variety of sources;
• Evaluation of the therapeutic effects of EVs in the repair and regeneration of a variety of tissues;
• Design and/or modification of EVs for use as biomolecule delivery vehicles;
• Optimisation of biomanufacturing processes for EVs to enable scale-up production for translation.

Dr. Jiao Jiao Li
Prof. Dr. Georges E. R. Grau
Dr. Elham Hosseini-Beheshti
Guest Editors

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• extracellular vesicles
• exosomes
• microvesicles
• stem cells
• tissue engineering
• regenerative medicine
• nanomedicine