Witwer Laboratory and Extracellular Vesicle Core

Extracellular vesicles are the ORIGINAL EVs. Some would even call them the origin of life: lipid "bubbles" that allowed the primordial self-replicating RNAs to survive and give rise to life. We are passionate about using EVs to diagnose and treat diseases, especially viral and neurodegenerative diseases. EVs are nanosized cell-derived particles that have many important biological functions in health and pathogenesis. EVs can serve as intercellular signaling platforms, and since they carry telltale "return addresses" of their cell of origin, they can be informative as biomarkers of disease. One of the many cargoes of EVs is ribonucleic acid. Although it is still unclear how frequently EVs transfer functional RNA, EV-associated RNA adds yet another dimension of information about the individual EV's cell of origin.

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Here in the Witwer lab, on any given day, we might be engineering ectosomes and exosomes to reverse viral latency, probing the contributions of drug abuse to inflammation, evaluating cutting-edge technologies for separation and characterization of EVs and other extracellular RNA carriers, and searching for mechanisms of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Please reach out with any opportunities to advance EV science and applications together!