Human pluripotent stem cell engineering with CRISPR–Cas9 for Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) entails loss of substantia nigra dopamine (DA) neurons and α-synuclein pathology. Currently, no effective disease-modifying therapies have been developed. Human pluripotent stem cells (hPS cells) can generate DA neurons on scale, enabling human genetic PD modeling of mitochondrial, lysosomal and synaptic connection failure that leads to DA neuron degeneration. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) extends this human model by providing causal, isogenic interrogation and transcriptional regulation of PD genes and reporter knock-ins that support purification and high-content screening. hPS cell-based DA cell grafts can restore motor function yet face >90% acute cell death and product heterogeneity in vivo post implantation. CRISPR enabled not only an in vivo cell survival screen to identify the cell death regulators but also a reporter-guided enrichment of DA neurons and chemogenetic control of grafted DA cell function in vivo. Here we summarize this progress and outline a practical road map to accelerate the development of precise human models and advanced hPS cell-based cell therapies for PD.