Extracellular Vesicles Release from Human Osteoarthritic Chondrocytes.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative disease which affects up to 40% of people aged over 65 years causing joint pain, stiffness/impaired mobility and having a significant negative effect on their quality of life. It is beginning to emerge that EVs could have a role in this disease pathogenesis: indeed, over the years the role of EVs as a mean of cell-to-cell communication has become increasingly clear and obvious; specifically, in OA it seems that chondrocytes and synoviocytes, the two most important cell types in joint biology, affect each other their behavior using EVs to mediate the exchange of information. In spite of this, the study of EVs released from these cells is very limited. Here we present a morphological analysis of EVs isolated from OA chondrocytes, showing both their release from cell surface (using Scansion Electron Microscopy) and their size and morphology (using Transmission Electron Microscopy); moreover, being known the role of enzymes in the degradation of the extracellular matrix associated to OA, we assessed the presence of Gelatinases and Plasminogen Activators associated to EVs.