Metabolomic Identification of Serum Exosome-Derived Biomarkers for Bipolar Disorder

Exosomes are extracellular vesicles that play important roles in various physiological and pathological functions. Previous studies have demonstrated that exosome-derived contents are promising biomarkers to inform the pathogenesis and diagnosis of major depressive disorder and schizophrenia.

We used ultraperformance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry to analyze the differentially expressed metabolites in serum exosomes of patients with bipolar disorder (BD) and evaluated the potential of exosomal metabolites as biomarkers for BD.

Our results showed 26 differentially expressed serum exosomal metabolites in patients with BD (n = 32) when compared with healthy control (HC) subjects (n = 40), and these differentially expressed metabolites were enriched in pathways related to sugar metabolism. We then utilized random forest classifier and identified 15 exosomal metabolites that can be used to classify samples from patients with BD and HC subjects with 0.838 accuracy (95% CI, 0.604-1.00) in the training set of participants. These 15 metabolites showed excellent performance in differentiating between patients with BD and HC subjects in the testing set of participants, with 0.971 accuracy (95% CI, 0.865-1.00). Importantly, the 15 exosomal metabolites also showed good to excellent performance in differentiating between BD patients and other major psychiatric diseases (major depressive disorder and schizophrenia).

Collectively, our findings for the first time revealed a potential role of exosomal metabolite dysregulations in the onset and/or development of BD and suggested that blood exosomal metabolites are strong candidates to inform the diagnosis of BD.