Year 4
The goal of this project is to define factors involved in choroid plexus epithelial cell (CPEC) development in mice, then to apply this knowledge to generate CPECs from mouse and human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) for clinical applications. Unexpected early success in generating ESC-derived CPECs (dCPECs) allowed us to accelerate and focus on the more translational goals of the project this year. We tested two new culture systems, with promising results from a more controllable and scalable monolayer culture system that will facilitate the improvement of dCPEC generation efficiency. New transcriptome profiling studies allowed us to better define highly-expressed genes for cell surface proteins, which will be targeted to purify dCPECs for downstream applications. New double-labelling and whole mount preparations of mouse choroid plexus have been devised to facilitate ongoing efforts to improve dCPEC engraftment of host choroid plexus after injection, and a new functional assay for dCPEC barrier formation and regulation has been established to complement an already-existing functional secretion assay in the lab. Efforts are also now underway to generate fluorescent and luminescent CPEC reporter hESC lines that should greatly facilitate dCPEC process development (derivation and purification). During this past year, new industry partners were recruited, an initial paper describing the dCPEC technology was published, and an initial patent application on the dCPEC technology was filed.