Figure 4.

Therapeutic potential of exosomes in ovarian cancer. 1) Drug delivery vehicles. Nanoscale drug delivery systems electroporate chemotherapeutic drugs and nucleic acids into exosomes collected from an appropriate cell culture or co-incubate them. Once the exosomes are successfully loaded, they could be used for downstream therapeutic applications. 2) Chemotherapy targets. Inhibiting exosome biogenesis and secretion is one particular therapeutic strategy for overcoming resistance either by using RNAi or other small molecular inhibitors. 3) Exosome-based immunotherapy. Exosomal PD-L1 could suppress T-cell activation, indicating that blocking specific targets on exosomal PD-L1 using anti-PD-L1 antibodies could improve tumor immunotherapy responsiveness. In addition, exosomes could be used as cell-free vaccines in cancer immunotherapy because they contain numerous tumor antigens.