AD living brain cells

Creating living brain cells from deceased Alzheimer’s patients’ biobanked brain tissue

New stem cell lines will allow researchers to “turn back the clock” and observe how Alzheimer’s develops in the brain, potentially revealing the onset of the disease at a cellular level

January 9, 2014

[+]

Staining of these biobank IPS cells show they retain pluripotency (scale bar: 100 microns)(credit: Andrew A. Sproul et al./Acta Neuropathologica Communications)

Scientists at The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute, working in collaboration with scientists from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), have for the first time generated induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells lines from non-cryoprotected brain tissue of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

These new stem cell lines will allow researchers to “turn back the clock” and observe how Alzheimer’s develops in the brain, potentially revealing the onset of the disease at a cellular level long before any symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s are displayed. These reconstituted Alzheimer’s cells will also provide a platform for drug testing on cells from patients that were definitively diagnosed with the disease.

Until now, the only available method to definitively diagnose Alzheimer’s disease that has been available to researchers is examining the brain of deceased patients. This discovery will permit scientists for the first time to compare “live” brain cells from Alzheimer’s patients to the brain cells of non-Alzheimer’s patients./.../