Extracellular Vesicles as Biomarkers for Parkinson's Disease: How Far from Clinical Translation?

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting about 10 million people worldwide with a prevalence of about 2% in the over-80 population. The disease brings in also a huge annual economic burden, recently estimated by the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research to be USD 52 billion in the United States alone. Currently, no effective cure exists, but available PD medical treatments are based on symptomatic prescriptions that include drugs, surgical approaches and rehabilitation treatment. Due to the complex biology of a PD brain, the design of clinical trials and the personalization of treatment strategies require the identification of accessible and measurable biomarkers to monitor the events induced by treatment and disease progression and to predict patients' responsiveness. In the present review, we strive to briefly summarize current knowledge about PD biomarkers, focusing on the role of extracellular vesicles as active or involuntary carriers of disease-associated proteins, with particular attention to those research works that envision possible clinical applications.

Keywords: Parkinson’s disease (PD); biomarkers; exosomes; extracellular vesicles; α-synuclein.

Figure 1

Schematic representation of the exponential growth of the number of publications (grey line) and patents (red line) reported on the Scopus database (https://www.scopus.com/; accessed on 31 December 2022). The blue line indicates the number of registered trials on clinicaltrials.gov. The search for publications patents and trials involved using the following keywords: “extracellular vesicle” OR “exosome” OR “microvesicle”.