Some ignorant, non-scientist, physicians who are retired and lost their medical license for incompetence are pushing some marketing hype about lyophilized exosomes for skin care. Let’s see why this lyophilization technology is for the convenience of the company, and to the detriment of the secretome/exosome product. If left in their natural state, the way NeoGenesis does in its products, exosomes are highly stable and maintain their natural penetration abilities. So good are exosomes at penetrating barriers that they are now being used for drug delivery.

Have you ever had freeze-dried food? It’s not very good. But it is convenient. Hiking, camping, or traveling through outer space, freeze-dried food is convenient. You won’t find it served at your local three-star Michelin Guide rated restaurant (I double checked the menu of my local 3 star Michelin restaurant and found no freeze-dried food on the menu). The texture and taste is off. Exosomes, when they’re freeze-dried, called lyophilized in the industry, suffer a similar fate as the freeze-dried food. Their texture and function is degraded, but it sure is convenient for the company – it’s a means to easily and cheaply store the exosomes. Put the lyophilized exosomes in a jar, store them in your company’s closet for decades, and then suspend them in water for use. Or ship them across country to unsuspecting customers because shipping powdered exosomes is cheaper and easier than shipping fresh exosomes. This is what AnteAge is doing. Making freeze-dried, powdered exosomes. What should we expect from a company founded and run by two physicians, John Sanderson, who lost his medical license for repeated incompetence and sexual abuse of his patients, and George Taylor, a retired medic living in Florida. George Taylor’s life work as a practicing anesthesiologist was standing around watching patients sleep as other physicians performed operations on the patient. Hardly a life of science, and a profession that had to have bored him silly. And I do mean silly. Just look at the silly BS he promotes. Laughable, and reminiscent of his days in the OR with too much laughing gas (nitrous oxide). Neither are scientists, nor have they ever published any scientific papers. They do have, however, a history of business fraud as I wrote about in another blog.

First, what are exosomes? About 20 years after the discovery of liposomes, scientists discovered similar lipid vesicles form naturally in living organisms. These include membrane-contained nanosized extracellular vesicles (EVs), secreted from cells as part of their normal process. This is a natural means by which cells in our body communicate with one another, and maintain and heal our tissues. We’ve known for many years that exosomes secreted by cells in the skin are important for the skin’s natural processes. Based on the origin and size of the EVs, as well as on the current understanding of their biogenesis, the vesicles are grouped as follows: exosomes (diameter ∼30–150 nm); microvesicles (100 nm–1 μm); and apoptotic bodies (50 nm–5 μm). So the exosomes we’re talking about are nanospheres, 30-150 nm in diameter, composed of a lipid bilayer and containing a cargo of proteins and microRNA, with proteins and other molecules tethered to the outside or embedded into the lipid bilayer structure.  Despite the evident similarities to liposomes, exosomes exhibit certain advantages, which make them a preferable drug delivery vehicle. As a result, in the last few years, exosomes have become preferable over lipid nanoparticles as prospective drug carriers.

Let’s look at why exosomes, which I described in my peer-reviewed book chapter in 2016, are degraded during these harsh freeze-drying procedures. Both the proteins in the exosome and on the surface of the exosome can be damaged during the lyophilization process of the exosome. Yes, even the proteins inside the exosome can be damaged by lyophilization. Damaged proteins can cause many health problems. You don’t want to be using a freeze-dried product with damaged proteins! The exosome surface proteome, termed the surfaceome, serves as the main communication hub between an exosome and the extravesicular environment (Wollscheid et al., 2009). For exosomes, the molecules on the surface of the exosome impart many functional qualities, such as penetration through barriers, targeting, and gain of entry into target cells. I discuss some of this in a recent blog. As a surface component, this compartment of proteins on the exosome often reveals the first signs of distress and disruption, and is of substantial interest to the scientific community for diagnostic and therapeutic development of exosomes, and especially enabling the exosomes as a therapeutic-delivery vehicle. We can say the same for surface glycoconjugates on the exosomes, which play important roles in exosome biogenesis, release, targeting, and uptake by cells. These important functional qualities ascribed to the glycans on the exosome’s surface can be disrupted by lyophilization. In other words, the exosome’s surface has been denuded by lyophilization, resulting in all those functions imparted by the surface proteins and glycans being lost. It’s like stripping the surface components off of a truck, such as its tires, so that the truck can no longer deliver its cargo to the destination. Its also like stripping the handles off the truck’s cargo door, so that the cargo can’t be delivered even if it did arrive. I could go on, but enough of the analogies.

The bottom line is that fresh secretome/exosome preparations are much more functional and efficacious than are lyophilized (freeze-dried) and ultracentrifuged exosome preparations, because that harsh freeze-drying process or centrifugation process damages proteins (and other molecule types) on the surface of the exosome as well as inside the exosome. Although it is more expensive and time consuming to work with fresh secretome/exosome preparations, companies, such as NeoGenesis and Skin Medica, who go through the pains and expense to prepare fresh sectretome/exosomes, offer a much more safe (this is a peer-reviewed, PubMed listed scientific study on the safety of the NeoGenesis secretome/exosome technology) and efficacious product than those who do the quick and dirty, inexpensive freeze-drying methodology.