Exosomes are nanoscale and lipid-layered extracellular vesicles, commonly found in the fluids and tissue of the brain. They carry specific proteins, lipids, and RNAs, and play key roles in intercellular communications.
The roles of exosomes in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are somewhat controversial. Exosomes can spread beta-amyloid and tau between neurons, contributing to the development of AD. On the other hand, they have the ability to reduce beta-amyloid and tau, conferring protection against AD. They have also diagnostic and therapeutic potentials in AD, as biomarkers and drug carriers respectively.
Although most drugs can’t cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB), exosomes are able to penetrate the BBB and deliver target drugs into the brain with advantages in terms of efficacy, safety, and targeting.
However, some issues including large-scale production of exosomes need to be solved before exosomes are applied clinically to AD.
ILIAS Biologics, headquartered in Daejeon, South Korea, is specialized in developing engineered exosomes to load proteins into exosomes and to deliver therapeutic molecules to the undruggable targets with a high level of efficiency. ILIAS has developed its proprietary platform technologies, named EXPLOR, Exo-Target, and Pure-Exo.
EXPLOR (EXosome engineering for Protein Loading via Optically Reversible protein-protein interactions) platform technology allows the intracellular loading of large molecules like antibodies by integrating a reversible protein-protein interaction module controlled by blue light, thus enabling therapies that are highly effective for targeting key intracellular pathways.
Exo-Target is the platform technology for active targeting that enables increased tissue targeting and cargo delivery efficiency by exosomes' natural tropism or surface modification. This technology dramatically improves the delivery of protein drugs across certain biological barriers, such as the BBB.
Pure-Exo is for high-purity and large-scale production of exosomes for clinical applications. And this is a breakthrough platform technology to enhance the scalability of exosome-based therapies.
For conducting an innovative research that can alter exosome-based therapies dramatically, ILIAS was recently highlighted as one of the ‘Top 5 Exosome-based Solutions’ out of 87 startups and scaleups by the Global Startup Heat Map. The ‘StartUs Insights Discovery Platform’ powered by Big Data & Artificial Intelligence selected 5 pharm startups based on criteria such as years founded, location, funding raised, and others.
On August 26th, ILIAS was also selected as one of the ‘World’s Seven Leading Companies in Exosome Research’ out of about 50 companies by the International Business Times.
With the advances in and help of these exosome technologies, exosomes as vehicles may have a considerable therapeutic potential for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders including AD before long.
