However, there’s no guarantee that an engineered cell will load the desired cargo into its vesicles. “The cells decide what to encapsulate,” says Young Kwon, a biomedical and materials scientist at the University of California, Irvine. Nguyen’s team is studying how cells make those decisions, to find ways to ramp up exosome loading with artificial cargo. Researchers have identified strands of code common in natural exosomal RNAs that probably play a part in packaging the molecules. And Nguyen has found that copying some of these molecular codes onto other RNAs increases their loading into exosomes by up to 100-fold. Read More