The Therapeutic Benefit of Bacterial Membrane Vesicles - PubMed (original) (raw)

Review

The Therapeutic Benefit of Bacterial Membrane Vesicles

Natalie J Bitto et al. Int J Mol Sci. 2017.

Abstract

The therapeutic potential of extracellular vesicles from eukaryotes has gained strong interest in recent years. However, research into the therapeutic application of their bacterial counterparts, known as bacterial membrane vesicles, is only just beginning to be appreciated. Membrane vesicles (MVs) from both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria offer significant advantages in therapeutic development, including large-scale, cost effective production and ease of molecular manipulation to display foreign antigens. The nanoparticle size of MVs enables their dissemination through numerous tissue types, and their natural immunogenicity and self-adjuvanting capability can be harnessed to induce both cell-mediated and humoral immunity in vaccine design. Moreover, the ability to target MVs to specific tissues through the display of surface receptors raises their potential use as targeted MV-based anti-cancer therapy. This review discusses recent advances in MV research with particular emphasis on exciting new possibilities for the application of MVs in therapeutic design.

Keywords: bacterial membrane vesicles; cancer therapy; recombinant bacterial membrane vesicles; vaccine design.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Architecture and composition of Gram-negative and Gram-positive MVs. While MVs are heterogeneous in size and contents, typically Gram-negative MVs are encased in the outer membrane which is embedded with LPS and outer-membrane proteins, and carry periplasmic contents including peptidoglycan, enzymes and toxins, as well as cytoplasmic proteins and nucleic acids. Gram-positive MVs are comprised of the cytoplasmic membrane and have been reported to contain lipoprotein, cytoplasmic proteins, enzymes, toxins and nucleic acids.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Methods of packaging recombinant proteins into MVs. (a) Overexpression of a recombinant membrane protein (yellow) may lead to enrichment on the MV surface; (b) A periplasmic signal sequence (blue) can be used to direct the protein of interest (yellow) into the periplasm, whereby the protein of interest may become encapsulated into budding MVs; (c) Fusion of a protein of interest (yellow) with a membrane protein can lead to targeted display on the surface of MVs.

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