iNeuTox 3D-cell culture models

Neurotoxicological damage often leads to diseases and symptoms of poisoning that are due to functional and/or biochemical changes in the nervous system. The increasing number of newly developed chemical compounds leads to a disproportionately heigh expenditure of time for toxicological testing, which is almost exclusively carried out in animal experiments. In addition to the problematic ethical evaluation, in vivo and in vitro animal models have the further decisive disadvantage of considerable species-specific differences. For the development of predictive test methods, there is an urgent need for human-specific test systems that enable core aspects of neurotoxic effects in the human organism to be mapped in vitro.

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) make it possible to obtain tissue-specific human cells under controlled in vitro conditions and thus develop new humanized test systems. For toxicological testing, hiPSCs are of particular importance because they can be patient specific and thus have specific genetics, e.g. a predisposition to a disease. In the iNeuTox project, iPSZ-based neuraonal cell culture models were used, which make it possible to establish human-specific, predictive, neurotoxic procedures.