Abstract
Despite the remarkable advances in therapeutics for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a large number of patients still lack effective countermeasures. Recently, the reprogramming of macrophages to an immunoregulatory phenotype has emerged as a promising therapeutic strategy for RA. Here, we report metabolically engineered exosomes that have been surface-modified for the targeted reprogramming of macrophages. Qualified exosomes were readily harvested from metabolically engineered stem cells by tangential flow filtration at a high yield while maintaining their innate immunomodulatory components. When systemically administered into mice with collagen-induced arthritis, these exosomes effectively accumulated in the inflamed joints, inducing a cascade of anti-inflammatory events via macrophage phenotype regulation. The level of therapeutic efficacy obtained with bare exosomes was achievable with the engineered exosomes of 10 times less dose. On the basis of the boosted nature to reprog
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Patterns and bottlenecks
A year into the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic, we are experiencing waves of new variants emerging. Some of these variants have worrying functional implications, such as increased transmissibility or antibody treatment escape. Lythgoe
et al. have undertaken in-depth sequencing of more than 1000 hospital patients isolates to find out how the virus is mutating within individuals. Overall, there seem to be consistent and reproducible patterns of within-host virus diversity. The authors observed only one or two variants in most samples, but a few carried many variants. Although the evidence indicates strong purifying selection, including in the spike protein responsible for viral entry, the authors also saw evidence for transmission clusters associated with households and other possible superspreader events. After transmission, most variants fizzled out, but occasionally some initiated ongoing transmission and wider dissemination.