Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) enabled bio‐applications: A critical review

Abstract

Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) are nanoscale spherical vesicles released from Gram-negative bacteria. The lipid bilayer membrane structure of OMVs consists of similar components as bacterial membrane and thus has attracted more and more attention in exploiting OMVs' bio-applications. Although the endotoxic lipopolysaccharide on natural OMVs may impose potential limits on their clinical applications, genetic modification can reduce their endotoxicity and decorate OMVs with multiple functional proteins. These genetically engineered OMVs have been employed in various fields including vaccination, drug delivery, cancer therapy, bioimaging, biosensing, and enzyme carrier. This review will first briefly introduce the background of OMVs followed by recent advances in functionalization and various applications of engineered OMVs with an emphasis on the working principles and their performance, and then discuss about the future trends of OMVs in biomedical applications.

Bio-Inspired Drug Delivery Systems: From Synthetic Polypeptide Vesicles to Outer Membrane Vesicles

“…Compared with the scalable and chemically designable PVs, the use of OMVs in targeted drug delivery has only been sporadically reported in recent years and is still an emerging area requiring urgent research [ 28 ]. Sangyong Jon’s study is recognized as the first report on using OMVs for targeted drug delivery [ 55 ].…”

Application of lipid nanovesicle drug delivery system in cancer immunotherapy

“…Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) are spherical nanovesicles that are naturally released by gram-negative bacteria with a lipid bilayer and the size is approximately 20-250 nm [92,93]. In 1997, Bermudes and his colleagues found that Salmonella can be a novel drug delivery platform for targeting cancer [94].…”

Extracellular Vesicles of Probiotics: Shedding Light on the Biological Activity and Future Applications

“…The main function of EVs is the transport of various classes of macromolecules, including lipids, polysaccharides, proteins, and nucleic acids [ 9 , 16 , 19 ]. Through this cargo, these structures perform a number of key functions in microorganisms, including long-distance transport of nutrients, protection against environmental stressors, or communication during microorganism–microorganism or microorganism–host interactions [ 16 , 17 , 20 ]. The importance of EVs in the virulence of many live-threatening pathogens is well known and widely described in the literature [ 21 , 22 ].…”