Evox Therapeutics, an exosome therapeutics company, has published Evox-funded research identifying novel exosome scaffold proteins that significantly improve drug loading into exosomes for therapeutic purposes in Nature Communications.
This follows a research collaboration and option agreement with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to develop exosome-encapsulated AAV (exoAAV) vectors as a novel gene delivery technology aimed at improving treatments for heart disease.
In the Nature Communications publication, the authors screened and characterised 244 potential scaffold proteins for their ability to enable robust drug sorting and loading into exosomes. 24 proteins showed robust sorting ability across five different exosome-producing cell types with many of these scaffold proteins being reported for the first time. Amongst the most potent are the novel tetraspanin scaffold proteins TSPAN2 and TSPAN3. These novel scaffolds were extremely versatile and could be used to load a wide range of drug cargos either onto the surface or inside exosomes.
“The discovery and characterisation of these novel scaffolds proprietary to Evox provides a new platform for exosome-based engineering and represents a five to ten-fold improvement over previously identified exosome scaffolds,” said Dr Antonin de Fougerolles, Chief Executive Officer of Evox.
