K. Flynn, D. Galitz, J. Sabat, S. Luhowskyj, S. Stoesz, E. Jabart, J. Cooper, and J. Aho
Abstract
Neurological disorders are the leading cause of human morbidity, accounting for over ten percent of all human disease. Traditional approaches for studying nervous system development, injury, and disease are largely limited to animal models, which often fail to fully recapitulate human disorders. Moreover, the variable etiology of a given neurological disease in humans demands a personalized approach to understanding and treating individual patients. Human pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells, offer an essentially unlimited source of neural cells that can be used not only to study the mechanisms of human disease, but also as powerful tools for neural regeneration. Here, we introduce our StemXVivo® Neural Progenitor Cell Differentiation Kit, which efficiently converts human pluripotent stem cells into neural progenitors. Within seven days, pluripotent stem cells are converted to Pax6, SOX1, and Nestin-positive neural progenitor cells. The derived neural progenitor cells can be expanded for several passages in vitro and differentiated into all three major cell types of the nervous system: neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes. These neural progenitors provide an intermediate multipotent stem cell population for further downstream differentiation, neuronal subtype derivation and mechanistic studies. The StemXVivo® Neural Progenitor Cell Differentiation Kit provides a powerful platform for the reproducible generation of neural progenitor cells from diverse pluripotent human stem cell sources for use in disease modeling and drug discovery.
