3D-ASC-Exos as a novel drug carrier for glioma treatment

It is known that antler stem cell extract has an inhibitory effect on glioma growth. Therefore, it is speculated that antler stem cell-derived exosomes (ASC-Exos) can be used as a new drug carrier for the treatment of glioma. Due to the limitation of exosome sources, we constructed a 3D culture system to harvest more exosomes. In this experiment, compared with the 2D-ASC-Exos obtained from the traditional 2D culture, the 3D-ASC-Exos obtained from our constructed 3D culture system were concentrated nearly 30 times in the culture medium volume, which was more convenient for subsequent purification. The two forms of ASC-Exos had similar morphologies and surface markers, but 3D-ASC-Exos were enriched with more miRNAs related to tumor suppression. In vitro experiments demonstrated that 3D-ASC-exosomes loaded with temozolomide (TMZ) inhibited the proliferation, migration and invasion abilities of glioma cells and promoted the apoptosis of glioma cells. The vivo tumor-bearing mouse model demonstrated that 3D-ASC-Exos loaded with TMZ exerted tumor-suppressive effects by inhibiting tumor growth and promoting tumor apoptosis. Meanwhile, the treatment with 3D-ASC-Exos loaded with TMZ caused no damage to the various tissues and organs of mice compared with the TMZ group. In conclusion, 3D-ASC-Exos can be used as a novel drug carrier for the treatment of glioma. Overall design: 3D-ASC-Exos were collected from 3D culture system. Total RNA pooled was collected from 3D-ASC-Exos to construct a cDNA library. 3D-ASC-Exos miRNAs were analyzed by Illumina NovaSeq 6000 for high-throughput deep sequencing.