Brain disorders like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s Disease start to develop in patients much earlier than when their first clinical symptoms appear. Treating patients at these early stages could slow or even stop their disease, but there is currently no way to diagnose brain disorders at those pre-symptomatic stages. A collaborative team led by David Walt at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital advanced their technology platform for detecting biomarkers of disease in extracellular vesicles with a critical step that gets them closer to that goal. By enzymatically digesting all surface-bound proteins from a purified EV population, they were able to specifically home in on the PD-specific cargo protein ⍺-synuclein inside of EVs while eliminating unspecific “contaminations.”