Fig. 2.

Therapeutic exosome applications. Exosomes have shown much promise in the treatment of myocardial infarction. a Much of the therapeutic benefits of stem cells appear to be mediated by paracrine exosome-based mechanisms, and thus extraction and delivery of such exosomes offers a lot of potential for a form of cell-free stem cell therapy, reducing the risks of stem cell injection and allowing production of a standardized off-the-shelf product. b Exosomes may be engineered for use as a natural drug delivery vehicle. Exosomes released from cells grown in vitro may be loaded with RNA by electroporation. Lipophilic drugs such as doxorubicin may be directly loaded into exosomes. c An alternative strategy is to transfect cells with an expression plasmid encoding an exosome-targeted protein, mRNA, or miRNA to take advantage of the cell endogenous sorting mechanisms to achieve exosomes-loading