The Link Issue 38

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#trending: regenerative medicine the latest generation is here By Alan J Bauman, MD, ABHRS , Bauman Medical Hair Transplant & Hair Loss Treatment Center, Boca Raton, FL “Exosome” is the new buzzword and rising star in the fields of regenerative medicine, stem cell research, as well as traditional medicine and pharmacology because exosomes represent the latest generation of naturally bioactive stem cellbased products for patient treatment.

What is an exosome? Exosomes or extracellular vesicles are tiny packets containing a wide range of cellular information, signals, and instructions that are created inside cells and secreted into their surroundings. They may be taken up by adjacent cells or travel to distant cells. Less than 1/1000 the size of a cell, typically ~100nm in diameter, they can be found in blood, urine, spinal fluid, and saliva.

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THE LINK MAGAZINE

For many years, exosomes were considered responsible only for the transportation of cellular waste out of a cell–not very glamorous! More recently, however, they have been recognized for their critical role in intracellular communication in health and disease, with now more than 14,000 scientific articles appearing in the clinical literature within the past decade. Because of their potential, biotech companies focused on exosome therapeutics and diagnostics have received hundreds of millions of dollars of investments just within the past few years and the exosome field is projected to be a three billion dollar a year industry by the end of this decade. An undeniable trend in medical research since the 1990s has been away from a traditional pharmaceutical approach toward the concept of regenerative medicine – a way to restore normal function to that which has


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