Year 1

Our research aims to develop drug-like compounds that are aimed to treat Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which may be applicable to other neurological diseases that heavily impact Californians, such as Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In the first year, we have succeeded in improving the efficiency of motor neuron differentiation to generate high-quality motor neurons from induced pluripotent stem cells. We have generated RNA signatures from motor neurons differentiated from induced pluripotent stem cells from normal, healthy individuals whereby key proteins implicated in ALS are depleted using RNAi technology. We have also generated motor neurons from induced pluripotent stem cells that contained mutations in these key proteins and are in the process of applying genomic technologies to compare these cells to ones where we have depleted the proteins themselves. In parallel, we have started to optimize conditions for a small molecule screen to identify previously FDA-approved compounds that may alter aberrant and ALS-associated phenotypes in human cell lines.