MPI of SuperSPIO20-labeled ALS patient-derived, genome-edited iPSCs and iPSC-derived motor neurons

Abstract

Genome-edited induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), iPSC-derived neural precursor cells (NPCs) and iPSC-derived motorneurons (MNs) have shown considerable potential for neurorepair in transgenic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) rodent models.When pursuing mutant gene-edited iPSC cell therapy in patients, it is highly desirable to have non-invasive imaging techniquesavailable that can report longitudinally on the fate of transplanted cells. With magnetic particle imaging (MPI), one can visualize andquantify the distribution of superparamagnetic iron oxide (SPIO)-labeled stem cells in the body. Here, we report an optimized magneticlabeling protocol for MPI tracking of gene-edited iPSCs and iPSC-derived MNs. We used SuperSPIO20® and Resovist® for celllabeling and found that the MPI performance of SuperSPIO20® is about 20% higher than that for Resovist® when it comes to imagingof labeled cells. Furthermore, we compared the detection sensitivity of MPI with T2-W MRI and concluded that MPI has at least10-fold higher sensitivity in cell detection.