Extracellular Vesicle-Mediated Communication Nanonetworks: Opportunities and Challenges

Computational estimation of chemical reaction rates in extracellular vesicle signaling

“…We focus our PBS on the degradation and uptake mechanism given in (1) and (2). In this context, we assume that a total of N receptor sites are available in the environment to interact with EVs.…”

“…Furthermore, we assume that all environmental EVs are subject to the same reaction rates and are present within the range of the receptor sites all the time and thus are available for interaction. By this assumption we can neglect the spatial component and focus on the reactions according to (1) and (2). Depending on whether an EV is in the environment or bound to a receptor site, it can react via two (pseudo) first-order pathways.…”

“…Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are nano-sized phospholipid spheres that are exchanged between cells in every living organism [1]. Cell-derived EVs act as signal transducers that can be used as diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic agents [2]. The processes of EV release (e.g., exocytosis and vesicle budding) and uptake (e.g., endocytosis, fusion and phagocytosis), Figure 1, are characterized by chemical reaction rates which are studied in chemical kinetics [3,4].…”

The End-to-End Molecular Communication Model of Extracellular Vesicle-Based Drug Delivery

“…The presented available computational and analytical methods, cannot be readily used in the EV biodistibution analyses because they are unable to address the critical challenges in the modeling of the propagation and transport of micro-and nanoparticles in the cardiac extracellular space, which is hindered by complex interstitial matrix between cells. A potential strategy to avoid this issue is to use the molecular communications (MC) paradigm [13]- [15], which utilizes mathematical tools widely applied in communications engineering to provide a systems approach for measuring information exchange in biological communication networks. The MC paradigm has been utilized in proposing an initial pharmacokinetic model of therapeutic nanoparticles' propagation considering advection and diffusion in the blood vessel [16].…”