Engineering extracellular vesicles for Alzheimer's disease: An emerging cell‐free approach for earlier diagnosis and treatment

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a debilitating neurodegenerative disorder affecting over five million people globally and has no established cure. Current AD‐related treatments only alleviate cognitive and behavioral symptoms and do not address disease onset or progression, underlining the unmet need to create an effective, innovative AD therapeutic. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have emerged as a new class of nanotherapeutics. These secreted, lipid‐bound cellular signaling carriers show promise for potential clinical applications for neurodegenerative diseases like AD. Additionally, analyzing contents and characteristics of patient‐derived EVs may address the unmet need for earlier AD diagnostic techniques, informing physicians of altered genetic expression or cellular communications specific to healthy and diseased physiological states. There are numerous recent advances in regenerative medicine using EVs and include bioengineering perspectives to modify EVs, target glial cells in neurodegenerative diseases like AD, and potentially use EVs to diagnose and treat AD earlier. This article is categorized under: Neurological Diseases > Biomedical Engineering Neurological Diseases > Molecular and Cellular Physiology Neurological Diseases > Stem Cells and Development Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are a promising application for targeted molecule delivery. EVs can be engineered to target glial cells, address dysfunctional processes involved in Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression, and function as informative biomarkers for earlier diagnosis to solve the unmet needs of an effective AD therapy and novel diagnostic method.