@article{6636,
  keywords = {amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, induced pluripotent stem cells},
  author = {Christopher R. Bye and Elizabeth Qian and Katherine Lim and Maciej Daniszewski and Fleur C. Garton and Bảo C. Trần-Lê and Helena H. Liang and Tian Lin and John G. Lock and Duncan E. Crombie and Steven Morgan and Yi Hu and Samantha K. Barton and Lucy M. Palmer and Elvan Djouma and Saritha Kodikara and Kim-Anh Lê Cao and Thanuja Dharmadasa and Anjali K. Henders and Laura A. Ziser and Matthew C. Kiernan and Kevin Talbot and Merrilee Needham and Susan Fletcher and Paul Talman and Susan Mathers and Naomi R. Wray and Alex W. Hewitt and Alice Pébay and Bradley J. Turner},
  title = {Large-scale drug screening in iPSC-derived motor neurons from sporadic ALS patients identifies a potential combinatorial therapy},
  abstract = {Heterogeneous and predominantly sporadic neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), remain highly challenging to model. Patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technologies offer great promise for these diseases; however, large-scale studies demonstrating accelerated neurodegeneration in patients with sporadic disease are limited. Here we generated an iPSC library from 100 patients with sporadic ALS (SALS) and conducted population-wide phenotypic screening. Motor neurons derived from patients with SALS recapitulated key aspects of the disease, including reduced survival, accelerated neurite degeneration correlating with donor survival, transcriptional dysregulation and pharmacological rescue by riluzole. Screening of drugs previously tested in ALS clinical trials revealed that 97% failed to mitigate neurodegeneration, reflecting trial outcomes and validating the SALS model. Combinatorial testing of effective drugs identified baricitinib, memantine and riluzole as a promising therapeutic combination for SALS. These findings demonstrate that patient-derived iPSC models can recapitulate sporadic disease features, paving the way for a new generation of disease modeling and therapeutic discovery in ALS.},
  year = {2025},
  journal = {Nature Neuroscience},
  pages = {1-13},
  month = {2025-11-24},
  issn = {1546-1726},
  url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02118-7},
  doi = {10.1038/s41593-025-02118-7},
  language = {en},
}