BrainFast Neuronal Maturation Supplement

There exists a dire need for more effective drugs to treat disorders of the central nervous system (CNS), and new cell culture models that are more relevant to psychiatric and neurological diseases are needed to improve the success rate of drug development programs. One such approach is the use of neurons differentiated from patient induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which present new opportunities for modeling disease processes and screening drug libraries.

A major application of neurons derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is to model neurological or psychiatric diseases for use as a drug discovery platform. Most phenotypes of neurological and psychiatric diseases arise in mature neurons. However, human iPSCs-derived neurons can take 1-3 months to reach full functional maturation, and yet manipulating the neuronal cultures for even 2 weeks in
384-well plates is cumbersome. Therefore, the substantial time required for achieving maturation is a severe hurdle for taking full advantage of human neurons as drug discovery platforms.

Numerous neurological and psychiatric disorders involve glutamatergic neurons specific to one or more of the six cortical layers. Death or malfunction of these specific neurons underlies disease pathophysiology and disrupts higher cognitive function. Study of these neurons may reveal the molecular mechanisms behind their vulnerability and enable development of more relevant disease models. Toward this goal, a protocol was developed to efficiently produce enriched cortical layer V glutamatergic neurons.

There is a significant need for in vitro systems that more closely model the human nervous system and its response to environmental toxins. Such a platform would have greater predictive power to indicate which
compounds pose a risk. Toward this goal, a platform centered on the use of iPSCderived human neurons was developed.