(Invited) Chiral Graphene Quantum Dot Enhanced Drug Loading into Exosomes

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 exosomes, 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 exosomal lipid bilayer. Both hydrophobic and hydrophilic chemical and biological drugs can be functionalized or adsorbed onto GQDs by π–π 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 sEV loading techniques. These drug/siRNA loaded exosomes can be applied to cancer treatment and immunotheraoy, which showed significant higher efficacy due to the efficient encapsulation of drugs or genetic materials.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 exosomes, 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 exosomal lipid bilayer. Both hydrophobic and hydrophilic chemical and biological drugs can be functionalized or adsorbed onto GQDs by π–π 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 sEV loading techniques. These drug/siRNA loaded exosomes can be applied to cancer treatment and immunotheraoy, which showed significant higher efficacy due to the efficient encapsulation of drugs or genetic materials.