In September, I had the pleasure of participating in the 2025 EV Center Retreat hosted by The Vanderbilt Center for Extracellular Vesicle Research (CEVR) in Nashville, TN. This was doubly exciting for me, since prior to joining Exokeryx, I was lucky enough to work as a research instructor in Dr. Alissa Weaver’s laboratory. Not only is Dr. Weaver a world-renowned EV researcher, but she is the current director of the CEVR at Vanderbilt, a center that has over 20 participating faculty and labs involved in cutting-edge EV research. The Center Manager, Dr. Renee Dawson, along with the CEVR staff, Caraline Bekas, Rebecca Chippeaux, and Meghan Courtney, have organized an informative, intimate, and enjoyable retreat on the beautiful Vanderbilt campus for the past 5 years. The theme of this year’s retreat was “Extracellular Vesicle Biology and Applications: From Plants to Humans”.
The CEVR began as a program in 2019 and became an official center in 2021, supporting the diverse array of EV research across Vanderbilt University, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Meharry Medical College. As this vibrant community grew, so did the opportunity to channel researchers’ enthusiasm and align their efforts. From this momentum, the mission of the CEVR was established — to catalyze high-impact discoveries in EV biology and therapeutics by connecting investigators, empowering innovation through advanced technologies, expanding collaborations and training, and elevating the funding success and global visibility of the field. The focus of research efforts at Vanderbilt runs the gamut from EV biogenesis and function, roles in cancer, extracellular RNA, and protein biomarkers to EV therapeutics, tissue repair and regeneration, and development of technologies to isolate, analyze, and track EVs. The CEVR provides training and equipment access for multiple floor and tabletop ultracentrifuges, ZetaView nanoparticle tracking analyzer, ProteinSimple Jess capillary electrophoresis system, and the newly acquired ONI Nanoimager. Additionally, the CEVR organizes a seminar speaker series, works-in-progress data club, and multiple events and workshops. Importantly, the center offers Travel Vouchers, Core Vouchers, and Young Investigator Collaborative Scholarships, allowing researchers access to funding for travel and core facilities.
The CEVR Retreat started off with breakfast and opening remarks from Dr. Weaver. The day was broken into three sessions, each featuring a keynote presentation. Keynote speakers for this year were Dr. Brian Eliceiri from UCSD discussing engineered EV therapeutics in tissue repair, Dr. Hailing Jin from UC Riverside with a fascinating talk about EV-mediated cross-kingdom communication, and Dr. Ke Cheng from Columbia University sharing exciting developments on EVs in lung repair and drug delivery. The day also featured multiple talks and posters from students, postdocs, and research assistants from various lab groups. Some common themes emerged in the variety of research shared. The mechanisms controlling EV cargo and trafficking are always a huge topic of discussion in the EV research world. Many scientists shared data on this topic, highlighting the importance of lipid dynamics on EV biogenesis and trafficking and the many determinants of RNA and protein loading. Likewise, the role that EVs play in cancer progression remains an important and promising area of intense investigation, and several labs shared exciting new clues about the many ways in which EVs and the extracellular matrix influence one another to impact tumor microenvironments. On the technological front, several labs in the Center are working diligently to address the technical issues of scalable EV production and purification, using engineered cell lines, hollow fiber bioreactors and suspension cultures, and cutting-edge purification workflows to produce high-purity, tissue-specific EVs en masse. Lastly, a representative from ONI shared updates to the advanced EV profiling capabilities of the Nanoimager. Perhaps the highlight of the day was the “EV Jeopardy” game, in which three groups competed against each other in a Jeopardy-style trivia game focused on EVs.
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The day ended with an informative panel discussion with the keynote speakers, with questions addressed from the audience about their thoughts on the current state and future of EV research.
Notably, the panel commented that one of the major barriers of development of EVs into therapeutics and biomarkers is that there are not many products for diagnosis, and it is difficult to develop translational applications. When asked to give advice for young EV investigators in a difficult funding climate, the panel noted that EV- and exosome-related grants are well received in study sessions, because established experts recognize that EVs are the future of drug delivery and therapeutic research. Having strong clinical partnerships is also a key advantage to obtaining EV-related research funding. Exokeryx is hoping to help remedy these obstacles by providing research and clinical labs with automated, reproducible EV isolation, allowing for better discovery of novel biomarkers.
Learn more about the Vanderbilt CEVR at their website: The Vanderbilt Center for Extracellular Vesicle Research | Vanderbilt University.
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