Objective

The advent of stem cell technologies has opened up new opportunities in drug discovery and development by providing new tools for drug screening, target identification and toxicity testing. The discovery of reprogramming patient derived somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) has offered a promising alternative as they can be used to generate large numbers of cells and varied tissue types including human neurons which are relevant to CNS related diseases.

Although iPSC derived neurons have promising applications in drug discovery platforms, their use for high throughput screening (HTS) has been limited by the traditional differentiation methods, which are lengthy and difficult to reproduce at scale.

Charles River has characterised with immunocytochemistry and branched DNA assay human glutamatergic neurons (eNEURONS/glut) differentiated from iPSCs using forward reprogramming developed by Elpis Biomed. Moreover a TR-FRET and a cytotoxicity assay performed in eNEURONS/glut plated in 384-well microplates and treated with tool compounds up to day 9 of differentiation showed good assay statistics and high suitability for high throughput screenings.