Recent advances in lipid nanovesicles for targeted treatment of spinal cord injury

Di Lu; Jiu-Ping Wu; Qi-Wei Yang; Hua-Yi Wang; Jun-Jie Yang; Gang-Gang Zhang; Chen Wang; Yan-Lian Yang; Ling Zhu; Xin-Zhi Sun

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2023.1261288

Recent advances in lipid nanovesicles for targeted treatment of spinal cord injury

Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2023 Aug 16:11:1261288. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2023.1261288. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Di Lu^{1

2}, Jiu-Ping Wu¹, Qi-Wei Yang^{1

2}, Hua-Yi Wang^{2

3}, Jun-Jie Yang¹, Gang-Gang Zhang¹, Chen Wang^{2

4}, Yan-Lian Yang^{2

3}, Ling Zhu^{2

3}, Xin-Zhi Sun¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China.
² CAS Key Laboratory of Standardization and Measurement for Nanotechnology, National Center for Nano-science and Technology, Beijing, China.
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁴ CAS Key Laboratory of Biological Effects of Nanomaterials and Nanosafety, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, China.

Abstract

The effective regeneration and functional restoration of damaged spinal cord tissue have been a long-standing concern in regenerative medicine. Treatment of spinal cord injury (SCI) is challenging due to the obstruction of the blood-spinal cord barrier (BSCB), the lack of targeting of drugs, and the complex pathophysiology of injury sites. Lipid nanovesicles, including cell-derived nanovesicles and synthetic lipid nanovesicles, are highly biocompatible and can penetrate BSCB, and are therefore effective delivery systems for targeted treatment of SCI. We summarize the progress of lipid nanovesicles for the targeted treatment of SCI, discuss their advantages and challenges, and provide a perspective on the application of lipid nanovesicles for SCI treatment. Although most of the lipid nanovesicle-based therapy of SCI is still in preclinical studies, this low immunogenicity, low toxicity, and highly engineerable nanovesicles will hold great promise for future spinal cord injury treatments.

Keywords: drug delivery; extracellular vesicles; lipid nanovesicles; liposomes; spinal cord injury; targeting.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work is supported by Key Research Projects of Universities of Henan Province (21A320064), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31971295), National Key Research and Development Program of China Grant (2021YFA1201500), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Science (XDB36000000).