12.07.2019Sherida de Leeuw and Christian Tackenberg, “Alzheimer’s in a dish – Induced pluripotent stem cell-based disease modeling”, published in Translational Neurodegeneration

Since the discovery of the induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technique more than a decade ago, extensive progress has been made to develop physiologically relevant cell culture systems. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease, accounting for approximately two thirds of all cases of dementia. The massively increasing number of affected individuals explains the major interest of research in this disease as well as the strong need for better understanding of disease mechanisms.
IPSC-derived neural cells have been widely used to recapitulating key aspects of AD. In this review Sherida de Leeuw and Christian Tackenberg highlight the progress made in studying AD pathophysiology and address the currently available techniques, such as specific differentiation techniques for AD-relevant cell types as well as 2D and 3D cultures. Furthermore, key challenges and future directions of this field are critically discussed and how some of the major limitations of the iPS technique may be overcome.

Link: https://translationalneurodegeneration.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40035-019-0161-0