EN
INTRODUCTION: Neurodegenerative disorders are acquired or inherited diseases of the nervous system, in which the main causative mechanism is loss of specific subtypes of neurons. Due to the fact that neurodegeneration processes are poorly understood, present therapies allow only for a delay in the progression or decrease in symptoms. An interesting approach is modelling of cellular interactions within the human brain using pluripotent stem cells. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are unique among other cells through their differentiation potential and self-renewal ability, thus they can play a key role in modeling the disease. Recent achievements in differentiation of stem cells enable generation of dopaminergic neurons from human iPS cells. AIM(S): The aim of this work was to obtain iPS cells from healthy volunteers and Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with the idiopathic form of the disease and to compare dopaminergic neurons derived from iPS cells of both groups. METHOD(S): To achieve this goal, peripheral blood mononuclear cells were reprogrammed with Sendai virus infection. Generated iPS lines were able to differentiate into the 3 germ layers in vivo (teratoma formation assay) and were also positive for alkaline phosphatase. Embryonal markers were evaluated by RT‑PCR. The differentiation of human iPS cells into dopaminergic neurons was performed. Expression of neuronal markers on differentiated cells was analyzed by immunostaining and RT‑qPCR. RESULTS: Differences between neurons generated from PD patients with the idiopathic form of the disease and healthy volunteers were observed. CONCLUSIONS: Moreover, preliminary results show immense potential for further analysis of dopaminergic neurons from patients with idiopathic forms of PD. FINANCIAL SUPPORT: The project was supported by a grant from the National Science Centre in Poland 2015/17/B/NZ5/00294.