Development of a high-throughput, quantitative platform using human cerebral organoids to study virus-induced neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's disease

Neuroinflammation is a central process in the pathogenesis of several neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers disease (AD), and there are active efforts to target pathways involved in neuroinflammation for molecular biomarker discovery and therapeutic development in neurodegenerative diseases. It was also proposed that there may be an infectious etiology in AD that is associated with viruses such as herpes simplex virus (HSV-1) and influenza A virus (IAV), leading to neuroinflammation-induced AD pathogenesis or disease progression. We sought to develop high-throughput, quantitative molecular biomarker assays using dissociated cells from human cerebral organoids (dcOrgs), that can used for screening compounds to reverse AD-associated neuroinflammation. We found that HSV-1 infection, but not IAV infection, in dcOrgs led to increased intracellular A{beta}42 and phosphorylated Tau-Thr212 (pTau-212) expression, lower ratios of secreted A{beta}42/40, as well as neuronal loss, and increased proportions of astrocytes and microglia, which are hallmarks of AD. Among the glia cell-type markers, Iba1 (microglia) and GFAP (astrocyte) expression were most strongly correlated with HSV-1 expression, which further supported that these biomarkers are perturbed by glia-mediated neuroinflammation. By performing large-scale RNA sequencing, we observed that differentially expressed transcripts in HSV-1 infected dcOrgs were specifically enriched for AD-associated GWAS genes, but not for genes associated with other common neurodegenerative, neuropsychiatric or autoimmune diseases. Immediate treatment of HSV-1 infected dcOrgs with anti-herpetic drug acyclovir (ACV) rescued most of the cellular and transcriptomic biomarkers in a dosage-dependent manner, indicating that it is possible to use our high-throughput platform to identify compounds or target genes that can reverse these neuroinflammation-induced biomarkers associated with AD.