Extracellular vesicle therapeutics for cardiac repair

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

• Level A · Stronger Clinical Evidence
• Level B · Emerging clinical evidence with positive signals
• Level C · Early human research exploring benefits
• Level D · Scientific groundwork from lab and animal studies
• Emerging · Emerging topic under active research

Abstract (original English)

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are cell-secreted heterogeneous vesicles that play crucial roles in intercellular communication and disease pathogenesis. Due to their non-tumorigenicity, low immunogenicity, and therapeutic potential, EVs are increasingly used in cardiac repair as cell-free therapy. There exist multiple steps for the design of EV therapies, and each step offers many choices to tune EV properties. Factors such as EV source, cargo, loading methods, routes of administration, surface modification, and biomaterials are comprehensively considered to achieve specific goals. PubMed and Google Scholar were searched in this review, 89 articles related to EV-based cardiac therapy over the past five years (2019 Jan - 2023 Dec) were included, and their key steps in designing EV therapies were counted and analyzed. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview that can serve as a reference guide for researchers to design EV-based cardiac therapies.

Evidence level

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

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