**Author details**

*Erythrocyte*

prospects [55].

**4. Conclusion**

for practical therapeutics in clinical use.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

**Acknowledgements**

(grant 21106616).

**Conflict of interest**

transfection reagents. Last but not least, RBCEVs can be frozen and thawed many cycles without affecting their integrity or efficacy. This fact suggests that RBCEVS can be developed into stable pharmaceutical products in the future, but further research needs to be done. Compared to most other current methods for programmable RNA drug therapies, which are unsuitable for the clinical use because of the low uptake efficiency and high cytotoxicity, RBCEVs show promising future

EVs are shed from the plasma membrane or released by endosomal pathways under both physiological and diseased conditions. Intercellular communication is one of the best known functions of EVs by far, which provides the possibility to utilize the EVs natural vehicle property of transporting nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids for drug delivery. Recent studies demonstrate that human RBCEVs can be developed as robust delivery platform for multiple therapeutic RNAs in cancer treatment. RBCEVs feature multiple benefits as compared to EVs from other cell types. They are easily obtainable in large amounts, can be frozen and thawed multiple times without significant compromise, are nontoxic and nonimmunogenic, can reach remote tissues in the body with minimal hindrance by physiological barriers, and do not contain DNA or other unpredictable contents which could result in horizontal gene transfer. By obtaining RBCEVs directly from the patient, they are safe to use allogeneic treatments and possess no risk of emerging mutations during expansion by cell culture. Thus, RBCEVs show promising advantages in overcoming various limitations of cell-based therapeutics. All in all, RBCEVs need further research in order to establish them as a new source and promising approach

We would like to thank our colleagues at City University of Hong Kong including Chin Siew Mei, Waqas Muhammad Usman, Tin Chanh Pham, Luyen Tien Vu, Boya Peng, Thach Tuan Pham, Abdullah Faqeer, Yeokyeong Kim, Seongkyeol Kim, Likun Wei, Ching Yee Moo, Ru Zhen, and Migara Kavishka Jayasinghe for their support. We are grateful to the generous funding from the Hong Kong Health, and Medical Research Fund (grant 03141186) and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council

**128**

Daniel Xin Zhang1† , Theodoros Kiomourtzis2† , Chun Kuen Lam1 and Minh T.N. Le1,3\*

1 Department of Biomedical Sciences, Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

2 Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

3 City University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen, P.R. China

\*Address all correspondence to: mle.bms@cityu.edu.hk

† These authors contributed equally.

© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
