Evaluation of established human iPSC-derived neurons to model neurodegenerative diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases are difficult to study due to unavailability of human neurons. Cell culture systems and primary rodent cultures have shown to be indispensable to clarify disease mechanisms and provide insights into gene functions. Nevertheless, it is hard to translate new findings into new medicines. The discovery of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) might partially overcome this problem. Commercially available human iPSC-derived neurons, when thoroughly characterized and suitable for viral transduction, might represent a faster model for drugs screening than the time-consuming derivation and differentiation of iPSC from patient samples. In this study we show that iCell® neurons are primarily immature GABAergic neurons within the tested time frame. Addition of C6 glioma conditioned medium improved the bursting frequency of cells without further maturation or evidence for glutamatergic responses. Furthermore, cells were suitable for lentiviral transduction within the tested time frame. Altogether, iCell® neurons might be useful to model neurodegenerative diseases in which young GABAergic subtypes are affected.