ABSTRACT
Background and Purpose --Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) causes motor neuron degener-ation, paralysis, and death. Accurate disease modeling, identifying disease mechanisms, and developing therapeutics is urgently needed. We previously reported motor neuron toxicity through postmortem ALS spinal cord-derived astrocytes. However, these cells can only be harvested after death, and their expansion is limited. We now report a rapid, highly reproducible method to convert adult human fibroblasts from living ALS patients to induced neuronal progenitor cells and subsequent differentiation into astrocytes (i-astrocytes).
Methodology and Results—Non-cell autonomous toxicity to motor neurons is found following coculture of i-astrocytes from familial ALS patients with mutation in superoxide dismutase or hexanucleotide expansion in C9orf72 (ORF 72 on chromosome 9) the two most frequent causes of ALS. Remarkably, i-astrocytes from sporadic ALS patients are as toxic as thosewith causativemutations, suggesting a common mechanism.
Conclusions— Easy production and expansion of i-astrocytes now enables rapid disease modeling and high-throughput drug screening to alleviate astrocyte-derived toxicity