Estimating the concentration of therapeutic range using disease-specific iPS cells: Low-dose rapamycin therapy for...

Pendred syndrome is an autosomal-recessive disease characterized by congenital hearing loss and thyroid goiter. Previously, cell stress susceptibilities were shown to increase in patient-derived cells with intracellular aggregation using an in vitro acute cochlear cell model derived from patient-specific pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Moreover, we showed that rapamycin can relieve cell death. However, studies regarding long-term cell survival without cell stressors that mimic the natural course of disease or the rational minimum concentration of rapamycin that prevents cell death are missing.

In this report, we first investigated the rational minimum concentration of rapamycin using patient-specific iPS cells derived-cochlear cells with three different conditions of acute stress. We next confirmed the effects of rapamycin in long-term cell survival and phenotypes by using cochlear cells derived from three different patient-derived iPS cells.

We found that inner ear cells derived from Pendred syndrome patients are more vulnerable than those from healthy individuals during long-term culturing; however, this susceptibility was relieved via treatment with low-dose rapamycin. The slow progression of hearing loss in patients may be explained, in part, by the vulnerability observed in patient cells during long-term culturing. We successfully evaluated the rational minimum concentration of rapamycin for treatment of Pendred syndrome.

Our results suggest that low-dose rapamycin not only decreases acute symptoms but may prevent progression of hearing loss in Pendred syndrome patients.