Sickle cell disease iPSC-derived sensory neurons exhibit increased excitability and sensitization to patient plasma

Individuals living with sickle cell disease (SCD) experience severe recurrent acute and chronic pain. Challenges to gaining mechanistic insight into pathogenic SCD pain processes include differential gene expression and function of sensory neurons between humans and mice with SCD, and extremely limited availability of neuronal tissues from SCD patients. Here we used SCD patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) differentiated into sensory neurons (SCD iSNs) to begin to …