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CELL THERAPIES

Immortalized factories of therapeutic vesicles

Nature Biomedical Engineering volume 3, pages 676–677 (2019)Cite this article

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Skin fibroblasts can be turned into immortal producers of therapeutic extracellular vesicles.

After cardiac injury, cell therapies can improve heart function and reduce scarring1,2. Yet the long-term retention of any transplanted cell is modest: less than 2% of the injected cells remain in the heart a few days later3. Hence, a transient bolus of injected cells stimulates endogenous repair in the absence of any significant contribution from the potential ability of the injected cells to differentiate into new myocardium3. In fact, cardiac repair is largely mediated by the extracellular vesicles (EVs) — fluid-filled containers of lipids, nucleic acids and proteins that participate in cell-to-cell signalling — secreted by the transplanted cells4,5,6. Physiologically, EVs merge with neighbouring cell membranes to release their contents into the target cell and to influence function. In cardiac cell therapy, blocking the release of EVs by transplanted cells attenuates cell-mediated improvements in heart function and in scar mass4. Intramyocardially injected EVs are also capable of replicating many of the salutary effects of cell injection4. Moreover, although individual microRNAs (miRNAs) and non-coding RNAs can mediate repair, it has become apparent that not all the benefits of EVs can be faithfully recapitulated by a single component. This underscores the complexity of the more than 20,000 molecules that are found within EVs.

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Fig. 1: Manufacturing of extracellular vesicles via immortalized cell lines.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Pushpinder Kanda, Sandrine Parent & Darryl R. Davis

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  1. Pushpinder Kanda
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  2. Sandrine Parent
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  3. Darryl R. Davis
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Correspondence to Darryl R. Davis.

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Kanda, P., Parent, S. & Davis, D.R. Immortalized factories of therapeutic vesicles. Nat Biomed Eng 3, 676–677 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-019-0453-9

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