Mitochondrial dysfunction, iron accumulation, lipid peroxidation, and inflammasome activation in cellular models derived from patients with multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS). Despite advancements in managing relapsing active illness, effective treatments for the irreversible progressive decline in MS remain limited.

Research employing skin fibroblasts obtained from patients with neurological disorders revealed modifications in cellular stress pathways and bioenergetics. However, research using MS patient-derived cellular models is scarce.

In this study, we collected fibroblasts from two MS patients to investigate cellular pathological alterations. We observed that MS fibroblasts showed a senescent morphology associated with iron/lipofuscin accumulation and altered expression of iron metabolism proteins. In addition, we found increased lipid peroxidation and downregulation of antioxidant enzymes expression levels in MS fibroblasts. When challenged against erastin, a ferroptosis inducer, MS fibroblasts showed decreased viability, suggesting increased sensitivity to ferroptosis. Furthermore, MS fibroblasts presented alterations in the expression levels of autophagy-related proteins. Interestingly, these alterations were associated with mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammasome activation. These findings were validated in 7 additional patient-derived cell lines.

Our findings suggest that the underlying stress phenotype of MS fibroblasts may be disease-specific and recapitulate the main cellular pathological alterations found in the disease such as mitochondrial dysfunction, iron accumulation, lipid peroxidation, inflammasome activation, and pro-inflammatory cytokine production.