Fig. 5

Possible therapeutic implications of exosomes. Exosomes may serve as biomarker for cancer diagnosis, staging, response to therapy and prognosis (a). Inhibiting of exosomes biogenesis and secretion from tumor cells have been suggested to reduce tumorigenesis (b). Exosome can be used as a drug delivery system. In this regard, source cells may be co-cultured with a drug to obtain exosomes containing drug or source cells may be genetically engineered to produce artificial exosomes. In addition, drugs are incubated with isolated exosome to load drugs into exosomes (c). Until now, exosome-based drug delivery system have been examined in vivo and in vitro