Extracellular blebs: Artificially-induced extracellular vesicles for facile production and clinical translation

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have emerged as promising biologic and comprehensive therapies for precision medicine. Despite their potential demonstrated at the benchtop, few EV formulations have made it to the clinic due to challenges in regulatory compliant scalable production; including purity, homogeneity, and reproducibility. For translation of this technology, there is a strong need for novel production methods that can meet clinical production criteria. Initial research aimed to address these challenges by taking advantage of natural pathways to increase EV yields. Such “conventional” approaches moderately increased yields but produced inhomogeneous EVs. Additionally, as there are currently no standard methods for isolation, characterization, or quantification, isolated EVs were often impure, contaminated with proteins and other biomacromolecules, and highly diverse in function. The use of shear stress and extrusion methods for EV-like vesicle production has also been investigated. While these processes can produce large EV-like vesicle yields nearly immediately, the harsh processes still result in inhomogeneous loading, and still suffer from poor purity. Chemically-induced membrane blebbing is a promising alternative production method that has the potential to overcome the previously insurmountable barriers of these current methods. This technique produces pure, and well defined EV-like vesicles, termed extracellular blebs (EBs), in clinically relevant scales over the course of minutes to hours. Furthermore, blebbing agents act on the cell in a way which locks the current surface properties and contents, preventing change, allowing for homogeneous EB production, and further preventing post-production changes. EBs may provide a promising pathway for clinical translation of EV technology.