In Vitro Evaluation of Exon Skipping in Disease-Specific iPSC-Derived Myocytes

Patient-derived disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have opened the door to recreating pathological conditions in vitro using differentiation into diseased cells corresponding to each target tissue. To investigate muscular diseases, we have established a myogenic differentiation protocol mediated by inducible MYOD1 expression that drives human iPSCs into myocytes. This highly reproducible differentiation protocol yields a homogenous skeletal muscle cell population, reaching efficiencies as high as 90%. Such high efficiency enables us to evaluate the efficacy of exon skipping in disease-specific myocytes. These disease-specific iPSC-derived myocytes can be applied not only for the validation of the therapeutic efficacy of specific antisense oligonucleotide, but also for the screening of exon skipping chemicals combined with the multi-well differentiation system. Although we previously presented the protocol in 2018, we have updated the myogenic differentiation protocol to the current version.