TY  - JOUR
AU  - Singh, Diwakar
AU  - Singh, Anita
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/09
TI  - Milk-Derived Extracellular Vesicles as Multifunctional Therapeutic Platforms in Human Health, Nutrition, and Diagnostics
JO  - Recent Progress in Nutrition
SP  - 007
VL  - 06
IS  - 02
AB  - Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are nanoscale, lipid-bilayer carriers that mediate intercellular communication by transporting proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, thereby influencing physiological and pathological processes. This review integrates current knowledge on milk-derived and human extracellular vesicles, highlighting their multifunctional roles in therapy, diagnostics, and regenerative medicine. Milk-derived EVs (MEVs), small EVs (sEVs), and human milk EVs (hMEVs) demonstrate unique stability, biocompatibility, and cross-barrier transport, enabling oral and systemic therapeutic applications. These vesicles exhibit immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory, and drug-delivery potential, making them promising platforms for tissue repair, intestinal integrity, metabolic regulation, and microbiota modulation. In oncology, EVs contribute to tumor progression, metastasis, and immune regulation, while engineered or milk-derived vesicles provide biocompatible platforms for targeted therapy and diagnostics. Integration with biomaterials, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence enhances EV engineering, cargo optimization, and therapeutic precision. Despite their translational promise, clinical applications remain constrained by heterogeneity, inefficiencies in isolation, lack of standardized protocols, and incomplete mechanistic understanding. Scalable production, reproducible purification workflows, cargo-loading strategies, and safety assessments are essential for advancing EV-based therapeutics from preclinical studies to clinical interventions. Continued exploration of cross-species and biofluid-derived EVs, along with improved characterization and functional analyses, will facilitate their integration into regenerative medicine, drug delivery, nutritional interventions, and minimally invasive diagnostics. Overall, this review highlights extracellular vesicles as versatile nanoscale platforms with significant translational potential in both pediatric and adult medicine, offering new avenues for precision therapeutics, functional nutrition, and biomarker discovery.
SN  - 2771-9871
UR  - https://doi.org/10.21926/rpn.2602007
DO  - 10.21926/rpn.2602007
ID  - Singh2026
ER  -