Extracellular vesicles for tumor targeting delivery based on five features principle

Abstract

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane vesicles with size of nanometers to several micrometers, which are released by most eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. Recently, EVs-based nanomedicines have achieved remarkable attentions. Five features need to be satisfied for EVs-based nanomedicine to achieve desirable anticancer activity after systemic administration, including long circulation, enhanced tumor accumulation, deep tumor penetration, efficient cellular internalization and drug release. In this review, we summarize recently reported EVs-based nanomedicines for efficient drug delivery based on our defined five features principle theory. Even though EVs-based nanomedicines are in infancy, it is expectable that they exhibit promising prospects for cancer treatment.

Keywords: Exosomes; Extracellular vesicles; Microparticles; Tumor-targeted delivery.