Mesenchymal Stem Cell-Derived Extracellular Vesicles: A Novel Cell-Free Therapy

In recent years, mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) have widely been considered as therapeutic tools in basic researches and clinical trials. Accumulating evidence supports the idea that MSCs perform their therapeutic roles in paracrine manner especially through trophic factors and extracellular vesicles (EVs). Compared to cells, EVs have several advantages to be used as therapeutic agents, such as they lack self-replicating capabilities, dangers of ectopic differentiation, and tumor formation, genetic instability, and cellular rejection by the immune system. Since the MSC-derived EVs (MSC-EVs) appear to exert similar therapeutic effects of their parent cells, such as ability to arrive themselves to the site of injury and immunomodulatory properties, MSC-EVs have been widely studied in many animal models, including kidney, liver, cardiovascular, immunological, and neurological diseases. Regarding this, MSC-EVs look to be a novel and interesting approach to be studied in clinical trials of different inflammatory diseases. In this review, we summarize the properties and applications of MSC-EVs in different diseases.