Exosomes are small vesicles released by all types of cells, and they have been postulated as a promising natural way to carry information amongst cells. Exosomes might serve as mediators for intercellular communication through the delivery of their endogenous cargo to neighbor or distant cells. Recently, this ability to transfer their cargo has open a new therapeutic approach and exosomes have been investigated as vectors for the delivery of the loaded cargo, for instance nanoparticles (NPs).Currently, several methods to load exosomes with NPs have been described; however, the maintenance of the membrane integrity on the vesicle has to be taken into consideration, in order to choose one or another methodology. Here we describe the NP encapsulation through the incubation of the cells with the NPs and the subsequential methods to determine their cargo and to discard detrimental alterations on the loaded exosomes.
Keywords: Characterization; Encapsulation; Immunoblot; Integrity; MP-AES; NTA; Nanoparticle; Protein; Size.
© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.