Most of the commercial plant exosome category uses one word for everything. The scientific field is in the middle of deciding that one word is not enough, and the line it is drawing does not fall where a buyer would expect. It has nothing to do with the plant. It has everything to do with how the vesicles were obtained.
This page sets out the convention as the field has proposed it, states plainly where our own material falls under that convention, and explains why we would rather publish this than be asked about it later.
The body doing the work
The International Society for Extracellular Vesicles launched a Plant EVs Task Force in 2024. Its stated remit is to put forward initiatives on nomenclature, isolation, characterization and standards for vesicles from plant and dedifferentiated plant cells. It is chaired by Gabriella Pocsfalvi, co-chaired by Carine De Marcos Lousa, and organised into four working groups. Nomenclature is WG1, led by De Marcos Lousa.
Two facts about its status matter for how this page should be read. The task force held the first Symposium on Plant Extracellular Vesicles as an ISEV2025 satellite meeting. And as of this writing it has published nothing. A position and roadmap paper is planned, with a Plant EV Reporting Checklist to follow.
So there is no ISEV plant nomenclature standard in force today. What exists is a strong and public indication of where one would land, because the person leading the nomenclature working group set out her position in a peer-reviewed paper in 2021.
The proposed convention
Pinedo, de la Canal and de Marcos Lousa, writing in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, proposed a two-term vocabulary. The distinction rests on whether the vesicles were naturally released into the extracellular space, or liberated by breaking cells open.
Plant EVs
Reserved for vesicles recovered from apoplastic fluid or culture medium, where the vesicles were secreted by intact cells and cellular integrity was preserved during collection. In practice this generally means infiltration-centrifugation of leaf tissue.
Plant-derived nanovesicles (PDNV)
Proposed, in the authors' words, for "all vesicular fractions obtained from plant tissues when destructive processes are used and when natural release into the extracellular space cannot be established." Pressing, grinding and blending all fall here.
The argument behind the split is not pedantic. The paper's point is that destructive isolation does not simply dilute authentic EVs with debris. It manufactures vesicle-like particles from disrupted membranes that were never discrete vesicles in living tissue, and those particles are recovered alongside whatever genuine EVs were present. The resulting preparation is a mixture whose composition depends on the processing, not only on the plant.
A separate proteomics literature reaches the same boundary from the data side, distinguishing apoplastic preparations from disruption-derived preparations and finding that destructive isolation yields highly heterogeneous material containing both authentic EVs and vesicles of uncertain origin.
And "exosome"
Under both MISEV2023 and the plant-specific proposal, exosome denotes a demonstrated endosomal biogenesis pathway. Essentially no plant preparation on the market has demonstrated that. MISEV2023 asks the field to default to the generic term unless the biogenesis route has actually been shown.
Where our material falls, stated plainly
BioThera's isolation train is: sourcing, wash, fillet, cold press, sequential filtration, enzymatic treatment, depth filtration. Cold pressing filleted aloe gel is a destructive process. The vesicles are liberated from tissue; they are not collected from an extracellular fluid.
Under the convention above, the technically correct term for our active is therefore plant-derived nanovesicle, not plant extracellular vesicle, and not exosome. We would rather write that sentence ourselves than have a reviewer write it for us.
Why we still say "extracellular vesicle" and "exosome" elsewhere
Two reasons, and neither is that we think the distinction does not matter.
The first is that there is no standard in force yet. The task force has not published. "Plant extracellular vesicle" remains the dominant term across the published literature, across regulatory correspondence, and across every product page a clinician is likely to compare ours against. Adopting a term the field has proposed but not ratified, everywhere and at once, would reduce clarity rather than increase it.
The second is practical. Clinicians, researchers and buyers searching for this category search for exosome. A page that refuses the word does not reach the people who need the information on it. We think the honest resolution is to use the discoverable term where discovery happens, and to be precise about what the term covers in a place like this one, rather than to be quietly imprecise everywhere.
What we do not do is borrow the clinical weight of the mammalian EV literature. The therapeutic evidence base for extracellular vesicles is overwhelmingly built on mammalian preparations, mesenchymal stromal cell-derived material in particular. That literature is not evidence about aloe-derived nanovesicles, and we do not present it as though it were.
What would move our material across the line
Two routes exist, and both are real work rather than vocabulary.
Change the input. Recover vesicles from aloe apoplastic fluid by infiltration-centrifugation rather than from pressed gel. This produces genuine plant EVs under the convention. It is also difficult to reconcile with manufacturing at commercial scale, which is the problem our platform exists to solve.
Demonstrate authenticity within the preparation. Show, with markers, that the particles carry plant EV protein signatures rather than intracellular contaminants. The proteomics work points to Class III peroxidases as the marker most conserved across species, alongside patellins, sugar transporters, multicopper oxidases, aspartyl proteases, fasciclin-like arabinogalactan proteins and phytocyanins. A marker panel on our own material would settle the question with data instead of vocabulary.
The second route is the one worth doing, and it is a characterization exercise rather than a research programme.
Why publish this at all
Because the checklist is coming. When the task force publishes its position paper and reporting checklist, every product claiming plant EV status on the basis of a juice or press preparation becomes visibly non-compliant with a standard written by the society whose previous standard, MISEV2023, our founder contributed to.
A company whose entire argument is characterization rigour does not get to be imprecise about the name of its own material. Saying so first costs nothing and is the cheapest available demonstration of the thing we claim.