S5.06 Introducing exosomes: exciting ideas for biological mailbags
Hello, and welcome to Genetics Unzipped - the Genetics Society podcast, with me, Dr Sally Le Page. In this episode, sponsored by Lonza, we’re unpacking one of the hottest new areas of research for both diagnosing and treating diseases, and that’s exosomes.
Before we go any further, we’d like to thank our sponsor for this episode, which is Lonza, a global manufacturing partner to the pharma, biotech and nutrition industries. They work with companies around the world to develop manufacturing processes that enable them to turn bright ideas in the lab into viable treatments for patients. One of the exciting areas they’re working in right now is exosomes, which have been hailed as one of the rising stars in the world of therapeutics. Lonza leverages their knowledge in cell cultures, viral manufacturing, and exosome characterization technologies to provide a complete path for exosome manufacturing.
Rossella Crescitelli, image courtesy of Lonza
Rossella Crescitelli: What are exosomes and what can they do?
To put it simply, exosomes are tiny biological bags of ‘stuff’ produced by cells that can travel around the body. They’re one member of a much larger family of extracellular vesicles - a blanket term encompassing a wide variety of ‘bags’ with various components, sizes and functions.
To find out more about exosomes and what they’re up to, Kat Arney had a chat with Dr Rossella Crescitelli, a researcher at Sahlgrenska Center for Cancer Research in at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, whose work focuses on studying these molecular mailbags. Click here to read the whole conversation…
Doug Williams: Taming the toxicity of cancer drugs
So far we’ve learned that exosomes are tiny packets of information produced by cells and released into the blood stream that allow cells from different parts of the body to communicate with one another.
Each individual exosome contains a little bit of the cell’s cytoplasm wrapped up in a specially labelled bit of membrane that provide the directions for where the exosome should go and which cells in the body should absorb it. It’s a nifty bit of biological engineering; a natural postal system for the body.
This has brought many researchers to the same question: can we take what we know about how exosomes naturally behave, and use it to either diagnose diseases from a simple blood test, or to treat diseases by creating a highly sophisticated method for delivering drugs.
To find out more, I spoke with Dr Doug Williams, the president and CEO of Codiak Biosciences. Codiak is a pharmaceutical company focussing on using exosomes to treat disease, whose exosome manufacturing facility was recently acquired by Lonza. You can read the whole conversation here…
Doug Williams, image courtesy of Lonza
Davide Zocco, image courtesy of Lonza
Davide Zocco: From Petri dish to patients
It’s all very well and good knowing the basic science behind how we can use exosomes to deliver drugs only to the places we want to target, but somebody has to make those exosomes before they can be injected into a patient.
That’s where Dr Davide Zocco comes in. Davide is Head of Exosomes Development at biotechnology company, Lonza and that means he’s responsible for taking everything we’ve learned about exosomes and turning that research into an efficient manufacturing process. Click here to hear what Davide told me about that process…
That’s all for now. Thanks to our guests Rossella Crescitelli, Doug Williams and Davide Zocco, and to our sponsor this episode, Lonza. You can find out more about the work Lonza are doing with exosomes here.
We’ll be back next time, discovering how viruses may be responsible for how our human faces look.
For more information about this podcast including show notes, transcripts, links, references, music credits and everything else head over to geneticsunzipped.com and you can find us on Twitter @geneticsunzip. We always ask at this point for you to rate and review us on Apple podcasts. But now you Spotify users can get in on the action too! If you head to our podcast page on the Spotify mobile app, you’ll now be given an option to rate us out of 5 stars. Your reviews not only make us at Genetics Unzipped feel really good inside, they also help direct more people to find our show.
This episode of Genetics Unzipped was written and presented and audio production done by me, Sally Le Page, together with Kat Arney. It is produced by First Create the Media for The Genetics Society - one of the oldest learned societies in the world dedicated to supporting and promoting the research, teaching and application of genetics. You can find out more and apply to join at genetics.org.uk. Our theme music was composed by Dan Pollard, and the logo was designed by James Mayall. Thanks for listening, and until next time, goodbye.
Image credits:
Exosome diagram courtesy of Lonza
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