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    Vi Chu, Ph.D.

    Manager, R&D, Stem Cells/Cell Biolog     Merck Millipore

 

Neurodegenerative disorders remain one of the most debilitating and difficult to treat diseases due to the difficulty in accessing affected brain tissues.  iPS-derived neural cells from affected individuals provide powerful tools to help model human diseases; however several significant hurdles remain.  These include relatively inefficient methods to generate, identify, and expand fully reprogrammed iPS cells along with the lack of robust standardized protocols to differentiate iPS cells to specific neural lineages of interest in sufficiently high number and purity.  A number of enabling tools that span the entire workflow have been developed and we will discuss (1) how to efficiently generate, identify & characterize iPS cells, (2) how to direct the differentiation of iPS cells to multipotent neural progenitor cells that can be readily expanded in adherent cultures, and (3) how to preferentially differentiate iPS-derived neural progenitor cells to enriched populations of neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.