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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2023.01.20.523510

Chiral Graphene Quantum Dots Enhanced Drug Loading into Exosomes

Zhang, Y.·Zhu, Y.·Kim, G.·Wang, C.·Zhu, R.·Lu, X.·Chang, H.-C.·Wang, Y.
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Abstract

As nanoscale extracellular vesicles secreted by cells, exosomes have enormous potential as safe and effective vehicles to deliver drugs into lesion locations. Despite promising advances with exosome-based drug delivery systems, there are still challenges to drug loading into exosome, which hinder the clinical applications of exosomes. Herein, we report an exogenous drug-agnostic chiral graphene quantum dots (GQDs) exosome-loading platform, based on chirality matching with the exosome lipid bilayer. Both hydrophobic and hydrophilic chemical and biological drugs can be functionalized or adsorbed onto GQDs by {pi}-{pi} stacking and van der Waals interactions. By tuning the ligands and GQD size to optimize its chirality, we demonstrate drug loading efficiency of 66.3% and 64.1% for Doxorubicin and siRNA, which is significantly higher than other reported exosome loading techniques.

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Zhang, Y., Zhu, Y., Kim, G., Wang, C., Zhu, R., Lu, X., Chang, H.-C., Wang, Y.. 2023-01-20. Chiral Graphene Quantum Dots Enhanced Drug Loading into Exosomes. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.20.523510

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