Clinical insights into extracellular vesicles for targeted myocardial drug delivery

The heart is a highly dynamic organ with limited regenerative capacity and a unique microvascular environment, which restricts the accumulation and retention of systemically administered therapeutics. Despite notable progress in nanomedicine and targeted drug delivery technologies, achieving efficient and specific drug delivery to cardiac tissue remains a formidable challenge.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) represent a novel therapeutic strategy for cardiovascular diseases, offering a versatile platform to integrate therapeutics, targeting moieties, and sensing elements for the detection, prevention, and treatment of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). This review highlights the recent progress in employing EVs as carriers for targeted myocardial drug delivery and explores their potential for clinical translation. A literature search was conducted using PubMed, focusing on studies categorized under EVs, cardiovascular diseases, and myocardium-targeted delivery. Current progress of EVs in clinical applications was evaluated based on the data from ClinicalTrials.gov.

EVs offer significant promise for clinical myocardial drug delivery. Some key considerations for clinical application of EVs include modulating immune clearance, establishing scalable production with stringent quality control, and refining surface engineering strategies. Facilitating EV clinical translation requires focused strategies to overcome current barriers, especially by integrating bioengineering and biomaterial-based targeting to enhance myocardial delivery efficiency.