Sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease infected human cerebral organoids retain the original human brain subtype features following transmission to humanized transgenic mice

Bradley R. Groveman, Brent Race, Simote T. Foliaki, Katie Williams, Andrew G. Hughson, Chase Baune, Gianluigi Zanusso, Cathryn L. Haigh

Human cerebral organoids (COs) are three-dimensional self-organizing cultures of cerebral brain tissue differentiated from induced pluripotent stem cells. We have recently shown that COs are susceptible to infection with different subtypes of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) prions, which in humans cause different manifestations of the disease. The ability to study live human brain tissue infected with different CJD subtypes opens a wide array of possibilities from differentiating mechanisms of cell death and identifying neuronal selective vulnerabilities to testing therapeutics. However, the question remained as to whether the prions generated in the CO model truly represent those in the infecting inoculum. Mouse models expressing human prion protein are commonly used to characterize human prion disease as they reproduce many of the molecular and clinical phenotypes associated with CJD subtypes. We therefore inoculated these mice with COs that had been infected with two CJD subtypes (MV1 and MV2) to see if the original subtype characteristics (referred to as strains once transmitted into a model organism) of the infecting prions were maintained in the COs when compared with the original human brain inocula. We found that disease characteristics caused by the molecular subtype of the disease associated prion protein were similar in mice inoculated with either CO derived material or human brain material, demonstrating that the disease associated prions generated in COs shared strain characteristics with those in humans. As the first and only in vitro model of human neurodegenerative disease that can faithfully reproduce different subtypes of prion disease, these findings support the use of the CO model for investigating human prion diseases and their subtypes.