Project: Profiling patient iPSC-derived brain organoid for drug screening in Parkinson’s disease
We aim to optimize the differentiation protocol for brain organoids derived from Parkinson’s patients for use in high-throughput drug screening pipelines, and to profile their cellular phenotypes and gene expression characteristics, laying the groundwork for the pipeline construction of mass drug screening. The brief research process is summarized as follows:
- Obtain permission to import stem cell lines (including individual patient disease information) derived from Parkinson's patients with genetic predisposition (familial history) from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF), and the European Bank for induced pluripotent Stem Cells (EBiSC), carefully manage the cell lines to prevent damage, and meticulously monitor and proliferate the stem cell capabilities of each line.
- Optimize the protocol to differentiate each patient cell line into brain organoids (cerebral cortex, midbrain) suitable for mass drug screening, with a goal to enable organoid culture in small dishes for large-scale screening.
- Profile the optimized brain organoids for high-throughput drug screening in terms of cellular morphology and genetic expression (transcription), providing foundational data for new drug development by comparing the natural pathological state of Parkinson's patients and their response to existing clinical drugs.