Development of a Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability Assay Using Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Derived Brain Endothelial Cells.

The development of translational and predictive models in vitro for assessing blood-brain barrier (BBB) delivery has become an important requirement in preclinical testing of CNS-targeting therapeutics. Here we describe a directed monolayer differentiation strategy to generate a population of brain endothelial-like cells (BECs) from human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) with robust BBB properties. To generate BBB permeability assays, the BECs are seeded as a monolayer on a semipermeable Transwell insert placed inside a companion plate to generate a two-compartment Transwell model. The BECs provide a BBB-like separation between the luminal (blood) and abluminal (brain) compartments to assess BBB permeability of CNS-targeting therapeutics.