Regenerative medicine is undergoing a paradigm shift from live-cell therapies to cell-free strategies. Within this evolving field, mesenchymal stem cell-derived extracellular vesicles (MSC-EVs) have emerged as a leading platform. These nanoscale vesicles deliver bioactive cargo that mediates critical therapeutic functions, including immunomodulation, angiogenesis, and anti-fibrosis. Furthermore, they offer improved safety, greater potential for standardization, and enhanced scalability compared to traditional live-cell therapies. However, clinical translation remains constrained by several challenges, such as inherent vesicle heterogeneity, limited targeting specificity, and bottlenecks in large-scale manufacturing. This review systematically examines the biogenesis of MSC-EVs, focusing specifically on exosomes, microvesicles, and apoptotic vesicles. We evaluate their functional performance across diverse regeneration contexts, encompassing orofacial, barrier, musculoskeletal, and visceral tissue regeneration. We further highlight innovative engineering strategies designed to enhance therapeutic efficacy, such as surface modification, cargo loading, and biomaterial-integrated delivery systems. In addition, we introduce an emerging approach utilizing engineered MSC aggregate-derived EVs inspired by organ morphogenesis. Finally, this article details the strategic framework required for clinical translation. The framework encompasses scalable production, rigorous quality control, comprehensive non-clinical studies, evolving regulatory pathways, and the current clinical trial landscape. Collectively, this work provides an integrated roadmap for advancing MSC-EVs as a next-generation precision platform for cell-free therapeutics.

Severe muscle injury is hard to heal and always results in a poor prognosis. Recent studies found that extracellular vesicle-based therapy has promising prospects for regeneration medicine, however, whether extracellular vesicles have therapeutic effects on severe muscle injury is still unknown. Herein, we extracted apoptotic extracellular vesicles derived from mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs-ApoEVs) to treat cardiotoxin induced tibialis anterior (TA) injury and found that MSCs-ApoEVs promoted muscles regeneration and increased the proportion of multinucleated cells. Besides that, we also found that apoptosis was synchronized during myoblasts fusion and MSCs-ApoEVs promoted the apoptosis ratio as well as the fusion index of myoblasts. Furthermore, we revealed that MSCs-ApoEVs increased the relative level of creatine during myoblasts fusion, which was released via activated Pannexin 1 channel. Moreover, we also found that activated Pannexin 1 channel was highly expressed on the membrane of myoblasts-derived ApoEVs (Myo-ApoEVs) instead of apoptotic myoblasts, and creatine was the pivotal metabolite involved in myoblasts fusion. Collectively, our findings firstly revealed that MSCs-ApoEVs can promote muscle regeneration and elucidated that the new function of ApoEVs as passing inter-cell messages through releasing metabolites from activated Pannexin 1 channel, which will provide new evidence for extracellular vesicles-based therapy as well as improving the understanding of new functions of extracellular vesicles.

Sympathetic cues via the adrenergic signaling critically regulate bone homeostasis and contribute to neurostress-induced bone loss, but the mechanisms and therapeutics remain incompletely elucidated. Here, we reveal an osteoclastogenesis-centered functionally important osteopenic pathogenesis under sympatho-adrenergic activation with characterized microRNA response and efficient therapeutics. We discovered that osteoclastic miR-21 was tightly regulated by sympatho-adrenergic cues downstream the β2-adrenergic receptor (β₂AR) signaling, critically modulated osteoclastogenesis in vivo by inhibiting programmed cell death 4 (Pdcd4), and mediated detrimental effects of both isoproterenol (ISO) and chronic variable stress (CVS) on bone. Intriguingly, without affecting osteoblastic bone formation, bone protection against ISO and CVS was sufficiently achieved by a (D-Asp₈)-lipid nanoparticle-mediated targeted inhibition of osteoclastic miR-21 or by clinically relevant drugs to suppress osteoclastogenesis. Collectively, these results unravel a previously underdetermined molecular and functional paradigm that osteoclastogenesis crucially contributes to sympatho-adrenergic regulation of bone and establish multiple targeted therapeutic strategies to counteract osteopenias under stresses.