Year 4

In our final year of funding, we made significant progress developing human stem cell based disease models to probe the causes of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and to eventually develop drugs. We generated and analyzed several new human pluripotent stem cell lines (hIPS) carrying genetic changes that cause hereditary AD or that increase the risk of developing AD. We detected AD related characteristics in neurons with hereditary and in one case of a sporadic genetic type. While considerable confirmatory work needs to be done, our data raise the possibility that AD can be modeled in human neurons made from hIPS cells. The methods we developed are moving us closer to having sources of normal and AD human neurons generated in the laboratory for drug-testing and development.