Establishment of a Large Collection of Cells from Major Depressive Disorder Patients to Model Disease and Therapy Response in Vitro

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a multifactorial psychiatric condition that affects 4.4% of the world population,causing substantial personal suffering, disability and social costs. Current pharmacological treatments for MDD donot effect remission in 30% of patients. The development of in vitro models for MDD will aid the understanding of thisdisorder, its pharmacogenomics, and the development of new therapies. Although hiPSCs from 6 MDD patients havebeen established, given the complexity and heterogeneity of the disease much larger sample sizes may be needed tofully model the disorder in vitro. To this end, we established a collection of 66 primary cells and 10 induced pluripotentstem cells (hiPSCs) from a sample of clinically well-characterized MMD patients, who were participants of a clinicalstudy that compared the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tCDS) versus escitalopram on the treatmentof MDD. Cells were differentiated in vitro into serotoninergic neurons, a clinically relevant cell type for MMD. Thiscollection of cells increases significantly the number of available samples from MDD patients, and thus will contributeto research into the molecular basis of depression.