Rapid and efficient generation of oligodendrocytes from human induced pluripotent stem cells using transcription factors

Abstract

Significance Understanding of myelin diseases and development of new treatment options are at least partly hampered by the limited availability of human oligodendrocytes. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) may be an ideal tool to circumvent this problem; however, rapid and efficient protocols to generate oligodendrocytes from human iPSC are currently lacking. The induction of the transcription factors SOX10, OLIG2, and NKX6.2 in iPSC-derived neural progenitors accelerates oligodendroglial differentiation significantly resulting in up to 70% of O4 + oligodendrocytes within 28 d. These oligodendrocytes myelinate the CNS during development and after demyelination, and are suitable for pharmacological screens and disease modeling. The strategy presented herein will markedly facilitate the studying of human myelin diseases and the development of screening platforms for drug discovery.