When Ralda Nehme, a cell biologist and neuroscientist, first started her lab at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2018, she realized a gap in the field. She was adept at growing stem cells in the lab, converting them into neurons, and using those cells to study the effects of genetic mutations linked to schizophrenia. But she soon realized that to truly capture the complexity of human disease, she would need to study a large number of cells from many people with or without the disease and with different genetic backgrounds.
To meet this goal, Nehme and her lab established the Stanley Center’s Stem Cell Resource. Blood or skin cells from donors can be treated with special proteins to turn them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which Nehme’s team then differentiates into any cell type in the human body, all bearing the donor’s genetic makeup, including any disease-causing gene variants. Currently, the resource holds frozen cell lines from about 1,000 donors with a range of diagnoses and ancestral backgrounds, which scientists can use to generate different cell types that more faithfully model human disease than animal cell lines.
We spoke with Nehme about why these models are particularly useful for studying psychiatric conditions, important considerations for new cell lines, and her hopes for the future in this Q&A.
