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Updated: Jan 31, 2026

Preparation of Exosomes for siRNA Delivery to Cancer Cells
Published on: December 5, 2018
Aptamer-Functionalized Exosomes: Elucidating the Cellular Uptake Mechanism and the Potential for Cancer-Targeted
Jianmei Zou1, Muling Shi1,2, Xiaojing Liu1
1Molecular Science and Biomedicine Laboratory, State Key Laboratory for Chemo/Bio-Sensing and Chemometrics, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, College of Life Sciences , Aptamer Engineering Center of Hunan Province, Hunan University , Changsha , Hunan 410082 , China.
Abstract:
Exosomes (Exos) are nanoscale natural vehicles for transporting biomolecules to facilitate cell-to-cell communication, indicating a high potential of them for delivering therapeutics/diagnostics. To improve their delivery capacity, a simple, noninvasive, and efficient strategy for functionalizing Exos with effective targeting ligands as well as elucidation of the cellular uptake mechanism of these functionalized Exos was found be to necessary, but remained a challenge. In this work, we used diacyllipid-aptamer conjugates as the targeting ligand to develop an aptamer-functionalized Exos (Apt-Exos) nanoplatform for cell type-specific delivery of molecular therapeutics. The cellular uptake mechanism of Apt-Exos was investigated in details, and distinct behavior was observed in comparison to free Exos. By combining the excellent molecular recognition capability of aptamers and the superiority of Exos as natural vehicles, Apt-Exos can efficiently deliver molecular drugs/fluorophores to target cancer cells, providing a promising delivery platform for cancer theranostics.
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