EVpedia: a community web portal for extracellular vesicles research.

MOTIVATION: Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are spherical bilayered proteolipids, harboring various bioactive molecules. Due to the complexity of the vesicular nomenclatures and components, online searches for EV-related publications and vesicular components are currently challenging. RESULTS: We present an improved version of EVpedia, a public database for EVs research. This community web portal contains a database of publications and vesicular components, identification of orthologous vesicular components, bioinformatic tools and a personalized function. EVpedia includes 6879 publications, 172 080 vesicular components from 263 high-throughput datasets, and has been accessed more than 65 000 times from more than 750 cities. In addition, about 350 members from 73 international research groups have participated in developing EVpedia. This free web-based database might serve as a useful resource to stimulate the emerging field of EV research. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The web site was implemented in PHP, Java, MySQL and Apache, and is freely available at http://evpedia.info.

Bacterial protoplast-derived nanovesicles for tumor targeted delivery of chemotherapeutics.

Increasing incidents of patients diagnosed with cancer have brought massive improvement in the delivery technologies to help patients receiving chemotherapy. However, tumor specific targeting of the chemotherapeutics still remains as a challenge mainly due to the difficulties in the conjugation and manipulation of bio-specific molecules on the surface. Herein, we genetically engineered bacterial protoplast to develop nanovesicles having no toxic outer membrane components that can specifically target and deliver chemotherapeutics to tumor tissues. The bacterial protoplast nanovesicles expressing tumor-targeting moieties on the surface were prepared by serial extrusions through nano-sized membrane filters. The nano-sized vesicular structure of protoplast nanovesicles offers passive targeting to solid tumor site and expression of tumor-targeting moiety enhance tumor-specific uptake via receptor-mediated targeting. Chemotherapeutics-loaded in the nanovesicles induce dose-dependent cytotoxicity in tumor cells in vitro. Moreover, specific trafficking of drug-loaded nanovesicles to the tumor tissue and efficient prevention of tumor growth in tumor xenografted mice are shown. Importantly, this tumor growth suppression of protoplast nanovesicles has shown to reduce the chemotherapeutics-induced adverse effects after systemic administration to mice. This study offers great potential of protoplast nanovesicles as effective and safe delivery system to optimize and contribute to the development of advanced chemotherapy.