disease modeling via hiPSC

GENERATION OF HUMAN NEURONS FROM INDUCED PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS FOR POTENTIAL SCREENING OF DRUG CANDIDATE
FOR NEUROPSYCHIATRIC DISEASES

Keywords: neuropsychiatric disease, depression, MDD, disease modelling, neuronal plasticity, dendritic spines, induced pluripotent stem cells, neuronal differentiation

In-depth understanding of and novel effective treatments for neuropsychiatric diseases have been lagged over decades due to a huge gap in the development of an appropriate and faithful disease model. In this study, hoping to overcome the limitations of animal models or post-mortem patient brain tissues; to address the existence of neuroanatomical differences between humans and animals; and to reveal dynamic cellular changes in disease mechanisms, the technology of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) or iPSC-derived neurons have been applied to generate a human neuronal model which is hoped to serve as a starting point for answering the mechanistic questions and screening novel drug targets.

We currently focus on generating human neurons from iPSCs to model neuronal plasticity under stress in a dish. The establishment of the stress in vitro model is hoped to pave the way for downstream experiments to study or evaluate, for example, post-translational modifications of protein in human neurons in stress-related conditions and treatment of novel drug candidates.