Extracellular Vesicles Meet Inorganic Nanoparticles: Production, Characterization, and Evaluation

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) and inorganic nanoparticles (INPs) represent two important classes of nanomaterials with significant clinical potential. EVs possess excellent biocompatibility, intrinsic targeting capability, and low immunogenicity, making them promising biological materials for diagnosis and therapy. INPs bring in diverse-such as magnetic, optical, thermal, and catalytic-functionalities to nanomedicine, enabling broad applications in diagnostics, imaging, and drug delivery. Despite their promise, both EVs and INPs face substantial challenges in clinical translation. Integration of EVs with INPs has been proposed to combine their complementary strengths to enhance biocompatibility and delivery efficiency, improve tracking, and expand diagnostic capabilities, with a number of EV-INP hybrids demonstrated in various biomedical applications. However, systematic evaluation and quality control standards have been largely overlooked, hindering further development and clinical translation. In this review, we summarize current methods for integrating EVs with various INPs. Importantly, we discuss criteria for characterizing EV-INP integration and propose a unified framework to systematically evaluate the resulting products, with particular emphasis on comparable metrics and quality assurance. Aiming to assist in benchmarking and translation, this review provides practical guidelines for the rational design and standardization of EV-INP hybrids toward intelligent nanomedicine.