Neurons from individual early Alzheimer's disease patients reflect clinical vulnerability

Abstract

Establishing preclinical models of Alzheimers disease that predict clinical outcomes remains a critically important, yet to date not fully realised, goal. Models derived from human cells offer considerable advantages over non-human models, including the potential to reflect some of the inter-individual differences that are apparent in patients. Here we report an approach using induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cortical neurons from people with early symptomatic Alzheimers disease where we sought a match between individual disease characteristics in cells with analogous characteristics in the people from whom they were derived. We show that the response to amyloid-{beta} burden in life, as measured by cognitive decline and brain activity levels, varies between individuals and this vulnerability rating correlates with the individual cellular vulnerability to extrinsic amyloid-{beta} in vitro as measured by synapse loss and function. Our findings indicate that patient induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cortical neurons not only present key aspects of Alzheimers disease pathology, but also reflect key aspects of the clinical phenotypes of the same patients. Cellular models that reflect an individuals in-life clinical vulnerability thus represent a tractable method of Alzheimers disease modelling using clinical data in combination with cellular phenotypes.