Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system (CNS), with focal T lymphocytic infiltration and damage of myelin and axons. The underlying mechanism of pathogenesis remains unclear and there are currently no effective treatments. The development of neural stem cell (NSC) transplantation provides a promising strategy to treat neurodegenerative disease. However, the limited availability of NSCs prevents their application in neural disease therapy. In this study, we generated NSCs from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and transplanted these cells into mice with experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a model of MS. The results showed that transplantation of iPSC-derived NSCs dramatically reduced T cell infiltration and ameliorated white matter damage in the treated EAE mice. Correspondingly, the disease symptom score was greatly decreased, and motor ability was dramatically rescued in the iPSC-NSC-treated EAE mice, indicating the effectiveness of using iPSC-NSCs to treat MS. Our study provides pre-clinical evidence to support the feasibility of treating MS by transplantation of iPSC-derived NSCs.
Keywords: induced pluripotent stem cell; multiple sclerosis; neural stem cell; regenerative medicine; transplantation.