Drug screening using iPSC-differentiated cells is a promising approach to evaluating potential therapeutic drugs. Neuronal culture is probably a more physiologically relevant assay system than stable mammalian cell lines, though much work remains to develop and characterize this system. To date, most cell-based assays have employed single layer cell cultures for testing compounds. A recently described 3D neuronal culture system provides a novel cellular model for evaluation of drug efficacy [14]. In this study, we combined these two technical platforms, iPSC-differentiated cells and 3D neuro-spheroid, to address several challenges encountered during drug screening and development.
