Induced pluripotent stem cell-derived monocytic cell lines from a NOMID patient serve as a screening platform for modulating NLRP3 inflammasome activity

Curative therapeutic options for a number of immunological disorders remain to be established, and approaches for identifying drug candidates are relatively limited. Furthermore, phenotypic screening methods using induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived immune cells or hematopoietic cells need improvement. In the present study, using immortalized monocytic cell lines derived from iPSCs, we developed a high-throughput screening (HTS) system to detect compounds that inhibit IL-1β secretion and NLRP3 inflammasome activation from activated macrophages. The iPSCs were generated from a patient with neonatal onset multisystem inflammatory disease (NOMID) as a model of a constitutively activated NLRP3 inflammasome. HTS of 4,825 compounds including FDA-approved drugs and compounds with known bioactivity identified 7 compounds as predominantly IL-1β inhibitors. Since these compounds are known inflammasome inhibitors or derivatives of, these results prove the validity of our HTS system, which can be a versatile platform for identifying drug candidates for immunological disorders associated with monocytic lineage cells.