Journal Article

Probing milk extracellular vesicles for intestinal delivery of RNA therapies

Zilbauer, Matthias, Luo, Xiang, Belaid, Mona, Mantaj, Julia, Vllasaliu, Driton, Limani, Rinë, Nayak, Komal, Zhang, Yunyue, Daci, Armond

2023

Overview

Background Oral delivery remains unattainable for nucleic acid therapies. Many nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems have been investigated for this, but most suffer from poor gut stability, poor mucus diffusion and/or inefficient epithelial uptake. Extracellular vesicles from bovine milk (mEVs) possess desirable characteristics for oral delivery of nucleic acid therapies since they both survive digestion and traverse the intestinal mucosa. Results Using novel tools, we comprehensively examine the intestinal delivery of mEVs, probing whether they could be used as, or inform the design of, nanoparticles for oral nucleic acid therapies. We show that mEVs efficiently translocate across the Caco-2 intestinal model, which is not compromised by treatment with simulated intestinal fluids. For the first time, we also demonstrate transport of mEVs in novel 3D ‘apical-out’ and monolayer-based human intestinal epithelial organoids (IEOs). Importantly, mEVs loaded with small interfering RNA (siRNA) induced (glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase, GAPDH) gene silencing in macrophages. Using inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) as an example application, we show that administration of anti-tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) siRNA-loaded mEVs reduced inflammation in a IBD rat model. Conclusions Together, this work demonstrates that mEVs could either act as natural and safe systems for oral delivery or nucleic acid therapies, or inform the design of synthetic systems for such application. Graphical Abstract

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Advances in Nanomaterials for Gene Therapy and Genome Editing / Biotechnology / Care and treatment / Chemistry / Chemistry and Materials Science / Cow's milk / Cytokines / Drug delivery / Drug delivery systems / Drugs / Extracellular vesicles / Fluids / Gene silencing / Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase / Health aspects / Inflammation / Inflammatory bowel disease / Inflammatory bowel diseases / Intestinal epithelium / Intestine / Macrophages / Methods / MicroRNAs / Milk / Molecular Medicine / Molecular targeted therapy / Nanoparticles / Nanotechnology / Nucleic acids / Oral nucleic acid delivery / Organoids / Pharmaceutical research / Proteins / Ribonucleic acid / RNA / siRNA / Vehicles / Vesicles