Plant-Derived Extracellular Nanovesicles as Engineered Nanomaterials for Antibacterial Therapy and Infected Wound Repair

Abstract Chronic infected wounds are hard to treat because three problems must be addressed simultaneously: infection, persistent inflammation, and stalled tissue repair. Conventional therapies rarely address all three. Plant-derived extracellular vesicles (PDEVs), nanoscale lipid-bilayer particles typically tens to a few hundred nanometres in diameter that are isolated from edible and medicinal plants, are an emerging class of biogenic nanomaterials reported to combine antibacterial, antioxidant, and pro-regenerative activities. Native PDEVs are reported to disrupt bacterial membranes, limit biofilm formation, and influence all four phases of wound healing, although the evidence that these effects arise from the vesicles themselves, rather than from co-isolated phytochemicals or added agents, remains uneven. Their properties can be tuned by cargo loading, surface functionalization, membrane hybridization, and stimuli-responsive design, strategies borrowed from synthetic nanomaterials. Here, we treat PDEVs as an engineered nanomaterial platform: we distinguish naturally secreted vesicles from tissue-derived nanovesicles and reconstituted lipid vesicles; relate size, curvature, and surface charge to antibacterial and regenerative functions; grade the evidence for each proposed antibacterial mechanism; and compare engineering strategies and wound studies in study-level tables. We argue that the absence of standardized isolation, characterization, and potency assays, together with limited chronic-wound-relevant evidence, is the principal barrier to clinical and technological translation, rather than the discovery of additional plant sources.