查看文章

Current neurotoxicity testing heavily relies on expensive, time consuming and ethically debated in vivo animal experiments that are unsuitable for screening large numbers of chemicals. Consequently, there is a clear need for (high-throughput) in vitro test strategies, preferably using human cells as this increases relevance and eliminates the need for interspecies translation. However, the human stem cell-derived neurons used to date are not well characterized, require prolonged differentiation and are potentially subject to batch-to-batch variation, ethical concerns and country-specific legislation. Recently, a number of human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived neurons became commercially available that may circumvent these concerns.