Gamma secretase modulators and BACE inhibitors reduce Aβ production without altering gene expression in Alzheimer's disease iPSC-derived neurons and mice.

In drug discovery, as well as in the study of disease biology, it is fundamental to develop models that recapitulate aspects of a disorder, in order to understand the pathology and test therapeutic approaches. Patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) offer the potential of obtaining tissue-specific cells with a given human genotype. Here we derived neural cultures from Alzheimer's disease patient iPSCs and characterized their response to three classes of compounds that reduce the production of Aβ42, a major driving force of this pathology. We characterized their effect on the cells, looking at Tau proteostasis and gene expression changes by RNAseq. β-secretase inhibitor and γ-secretase modulators left the transcriptional balance of the cells virtually unaffected, while γ-secretase inhibitors caused drastic gene expression changes due to Notch inhibition. We observed similar effects in vivo, treating mice with the same compound classes. Our results show that β-secretase inhibitors and γ-secretase modulators are attractive candidates for modulating Aβ production in Alzheimer's disease. Moreover, we demonstrate that the response to compounds obtained with iPSC-derived neurons is similar to the one observable in vivo.