Bone‐Targeted Exosomes: Strategies and Applications

Abstract

As the global population ages, bone-related diseases have increasingly become a major social problem threatening human health. Exosomes, as natural cell products, have been used to treat bone-related diseases due to their superior biocompatibility, biological barrier penetration, and therapeutic effects. Moreover, the modified exosomes exhibit strong bone-targeting capabilities that may improve efficacy and avoid systemic side effects, demonstrating promising translational potential. However, a review of bone-targeted exosomes is still lacking. Thus, the recently developed exosomes for bone-targeting applications in this review are focused. The biogenesis and bone-targeting regulatory functions of exosomes, the constructive strategies of modified exosomes to improve bone-targeting, and their therapeutic effects for bone-related diseases are introduced. By summarizing developments and challenges in bone-targeted exosomes, It is striven to shed light on the selection of exosome constructive strategies for different bone diseases and highlight their translational potential for future clinical orthopedics.

Synthetic biology‐based bacterial extracellular vesicles displaying BMP‐2 and CXCR4 to ameliorate osteoporosis

“…Our team also proposed the concept of bone‐targeted biomaterial strategy for osteoporotic bone repair (Ren et al., 2022). Natural or engineered EVs exhibit strong bone‐targeting capabilities and become promising therapeutic approaches for orthopaedic diseases (Wang et al., 2023). Although we have verified the great in vivo targeting ability of CXCR4 + BEVs (Liu et al., 2023) and CXCR4 + MEVs (Hu et al., 2021), we further investigated the in vivo distribution of BEVs‐BC in the presence of BMP‐2 expression.…”

Bone-Targeting HUVEC-Derived Exosomes Containing miR-503-5p for Osteoporosis Therapy

“…Finally, some cell-derived exosomes have natural targeting properties. Song et al found that endothelial cell-derived exosomes have a natural bone-targeting effect, while some other exosome-based materials also showed bone-targeting ability. ,− Our research also found that compared to BMSC-derived exosomes, HUVEC-Exos have stronger bone-targeting capabilities and are nontoxic, making them an ideal natural bone-targeting nanomaterial. Subsequent orthopedic research can further explore the use of this material for the treatment of bone-related diseases such as OP, fractures, and bone defects.…”

Beyond Traditional Medicine: EVs-Loaded Hydrogels as a Game Changer in Disease Therapeutics

“…In recent years, EVs have attracted a lot of attention for CFTs [ 188 ], which can be isolated from human cells, body fluids, milk, bacteria, etc. [ 189 , 190 , 191 ].…”