MPI of SuperSPIO20-labeled ALS patient-derived, genome-edited iPSCs and iPSC-derived motor neurons

Genome-edited induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), iPSC-derived neural precursor cells (NPCs) and iPSC-derived motor neurons (MNs) have shown considerable potential for neurorepair in transgenic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) rodent models. When pursuing mutant gene-edited iPSC cell therapy in patients, it is highly desirable to have non-invasive imaging techniques available that can report longitudinally on the fate of transplanted cells. With magnetic particle imaging (MPI), one can visualize and quantify the distribution of superparamagnetic iron oxide (SPIO)-labeled stem cells in the body. Here, we report an optimized magnetic labeling protocol for MPI tracking of gene-edited iPSCs and iPSC-derived MNs. We used SuperSPIO20^® and Resovist^® for cell labeling and found that the MPI performance of SuperSPIO20^® is about 20% higher than that for Resovist^® when it comes to imaging of labeled cells. Furthermore, we compared the detection sensitivity of MPI with T2-W MRI and concluded that MPI has at least 10-fold higher sensitivity in cell detection.