A therapy using pig semen-derived exosomes, engineered into eye drops capable of penetrating deep into retinal tissue, may hold the key to breaching the brain’s defences against diseases like Alzheimer’s.
This advance, led by Professor Zhang Yu at China’s Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, originally targeted a rare childhood eye cancer retinoblastoma that often resists conventional treatments due to its delicate location near the brain.
Published in peer-reviewed journal Science Advances on March 27, the research shows how exosomes, or natural nanoparticles from pig semen, can safely deliver drugs through biological barriers.
Zhao Chunxia, a drug delivery researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia, noted the technology’s broad potential.
“The technique could improve drug delivery across other barriers that are similarly difficult to breach, such as the blood-brain barrier, to treat conditions including Alzheimer’s disease,” she was quoted by Nature News as saying on the same day.
This is not the first time Chinese scientists have turned to pigs for creative medical breakthroughs.
In 2025, researchers injected a drug that “disguised” tumours as pig tissue, tricking the immune system into attacking them. And over 2024-2025, the world’s first pig-liver and pig-lung transplants were performed in China, using gene-edited pigs to eliminate rejection-causing genes.
