Neural cells grown from stem cells of patients with Alzheimer's disease could be used to evaluate drugs for subsets of patients.

Teams led by Haruhisa Inoue of Kyoto University, and Nobuhisa Iwata of Nagasaki University, both in Japan, generated induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from patients with inherited and non-inherited forms of the disease. Neurons derived from these cells were treated with the omega-3 fatty acid docosahexaenoic acid — which has previously failed in some clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease. The compound partially increased the survival time of neurons from a patient with an inherited form of the disease but had no effect on the survival of neurons from patients with non-inherited disease. Responses to cellular stress as well as accumulation of the protein amyloid-β, which is associated with the disease, also varied between neurons derived from different patients.

The authors suggest that patient-specific iPS cells could help researchers to explain variable clinical results and guide drug development.

Cell Stem Cell http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2013.01.009 (2013)