Enrichment of extracellular vesicles using Mag-Net for the analysis of the plasma proteome

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) in plasma are composed of exosomes, microvesicles, and apoptotic bodies. We report a plasma EV enrichment strategy using magnetic beads called Mag-Net. Proteomic interrogation of this plasma EV fraction enables the detection of proteins that are beyond the dynamic range of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry of unfractionated plasma. Mag-Net is robust, reproducible, inexpensive, and requires 37,000 peptides from >4,000 proteins. Using Mag-Net on a pilot cohort of patients with neurodegenerative disease and healthy controls, we find 204 proteins that differentiate (q-value < 0.05) patients with Alzheimer's disease dementia (ADD) from those without ADD. There are also 310 proteins that differ between individuals with Parkinson's disease and without. Using machine learning we distinguish between individuals with ADD and not ADD with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) = 0.98 ± 0.06.