Establishing an In Vitro Assay for Effectively Predicting ​Neurotoxicity Risks Using Functional Human iPSC-Derived Neurons​

Human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived neural cultures are a promising alternative to animal and primary culture models for neurotoxicity testing. Here we present the development and validation of a highly reproducible and predictive hiPSC-derived neuronal/glial in vitro co-culture platform for the quantitative assessment of the neurological liability of compounds in a medium-throughput setting. ​

 

The system incorporates the NeuCyte SynFire neurons optimized for neurotoxicity testing coupled with a proprietary data analysis pipeline. Using this innovative platform, we have tested 40 compounds in which our neurotoxicity risk prediction highly correlated with known clinical and animal data. We believe our hiPSC platform represents the future of high throughput neurotoxicity assessment for early drug discovery for the pharmaceutical industry and the environmental impact of agricultural compounds.