Xcell Therapeutics hosts symposium to celebrate launch of exosome-specific media... "enabling high purity exosome extraction" 

As exosome technology is gaining attention as the next generation of therapeutics worldwide, Xcell Therapeutics (CEO Lee Yi-il), a Korean culture medium company, held a symposium to celebrate the launch of CellCor EXO CD, a dedicated medium that can effectively produce mesenchymal stem cell-derived exosomes.

 Excelsior Pharmaceuticals is the first company in the world to develop a serum-free chemotactic medium for GMP-grade stem cells.

The event, which was held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Gangnam, Seoul on the 27th, was attended by about 80 domestic and international scholars and industry representatives, reflecting the high interest in exosomes.

Xcell Therapeutics' newly launched exosome-specific medium, CellCor EXO CD, is a product that enables high-functional and high-purity exosome extraction. It is a product that enables many companies to secure high-purity exosomes, which are difficult to obtain, and is expected to receive a lot of attention from domestic and foreign exosome therapeutic development companies.

 The event began with a greeting from Dr. Lee, CEO of Xcell Therapeutics, followed by presentations from invited speakers.

In his greeting, Mr. Lee emphasized that "the priority value of product production is to secure product homogeneity." "Xcell Therapeutics will strive to develop media that can ensure not only reproducibility and homogeneity of innovative modalities, but also safety and economy."

 In his congratulatory remarks, Mansoon Hwang, CEO of Korea Investment Partners, said, "Over the past 20 years of investment work, I have realized that the development of basic technologies, including media, is crucial for the success of a new drug. I hope that all participants will work together to develop the bio industry."

 The first speaker of the symposium was Dr. Peter Frost from Pelo Biotech, who said, "Media containing bovine serum (FBS) and human platelets (Hpl) are controversial because they can have unpredictable effects on extracellular vesicles (EVs), and to overcome this, there is a need to develop optimized media for EV research."

Prof. Dr. Bermd Giebel, from the University Duisburg-Essen, is the lead author of the study. "Our research has led to the development of clonal immortalized MSC-derived EVs (ciMSC-EVs) as promising new therapeutic agents for various diseases such as graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), ischemic stroke, COVID-19, and sepsis," said the second speaker, Dr. Bermd Giebel, University Duisburg-Essen, "We are currently using a medium containing human platelet components (Hpl), but in order to mass produce MSC-EV-based therapeutics with uniform quality, we are looking for a medium that is GMP-compliant and supports both excellent proliferation of ciMSCs and strong EV secretion."

Dr. Hyoil Chung, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yonsei University, introduced a novel microfluidic chip that overcomes the shortcomings of existing exosome isolation methods such as ultracentrifugation. Compared to conventional methods, the microfluidic chip takes less time to isolate exosomes and has the advantage of phenotypically separating exosomes through microbeads of various sizes immobilized on the surface. "The microfluidic chip is expected to open up new avenues for early diagnosis of exosome-based diseases," said Dr. Chung.

"Cell culture media is a basic requirement for maintaining cell survival and growth during cell culture, and the yield and quality of cell-derived exosomes can vary depending on the quality of the media used for culture," said Dr. Lee Ju-yeon, head of research at Xcell Therapeutics. "The use of Chemically Defined Media, which does not contain animal and human-derived exosomes, is a very important factor in terms of providing an ideal culture environment for exosome production."

The discussion, moderated by Dr. Yong Song Lee of POSTECH, discussed the future development direction of EV-based therapeutics, including exosomes, and various necessary technologies such as purity improvement and quantification methods, as well as questions and answers from the participants.

Exosomes are 50~200nm (nanometer) vesicles secreted by cells and are maternal cells. They similarly contain proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, peptides, etc. and act as messengers for signaling between cells.

Exosomes can overcome the safety issues of cellular therapies such as immune rejection and vascular occlusion while maintaining similar pharmacological effects to existing cellular therapies, and have advantages in storage and distribution. In addition, exosomes are attracting attention as a next-generation drug delivery vehicle because they can be loaded with drugs and delivered into cells. Not only stem cell-derived exosomes targeting intractable diseases, but also immune cell-derived exosomes loaded with anticancer drugs are being developed as targeted anticancer drugs.

As such, exosomes are beginning to be commercialized as disease-specific biomarkers in diagnostics, and their therapeutic applications are emerging, leading to a surge in the number of companies researching and developing exosome-based technologies around the world, and the related market is expected to explode.

 According to market research firm DBMR Research, the global exosome market is expected to grow from $11.74 billion (about KRW 14 trillion) in 2021 to $36.92 billion (KRW 38 trillion) by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate of about 21.9%.

 "After developing the world's first GMP-grade Serum-Free Chemically Defined Media for hMSCs, Xcell Therapeutics is expanding its pipeline to include hair follicle cell-specific media, exosome-specific media, and NK-specific media," said Dr. Lee. "We have been able to quickly build our pipeline using our own cell-specific media development platform through many trials and errors. We will continue to launch media for the production of advanced biopharmaceuticals in various fields and become a world-class media specialist.

 https://www.biotimes.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=10617