Disease-Specific iPS Cell Models in Neuroscience

E-ISSN： 1875-5666|13|5|832-841

ISSN： 1566-5240

Source： Current Molecular Medicine, Vol.13, Iss.5, 2013-06, pp. : 832-841

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Abstract

Neurodegenerative diseases are a heterogeneous group of sporadic or familial disorders of the nervous system that mostly lead to a progressive loss of neural cells. A major challenge in studying the molecular pathomechanisms underlying these disorders is the limited experimental access to disease-affected human nervous system tissue. In addition, considering that the molecular disease initiation occurs years or decades before the symptomatic onset of a medical condition, these tissues mostly reflect only the final phase of the disease. To overcome these limitations, various model systems have been established based on gainand loss-of-function studies in transformed cell lines or transgenic animal models. Although these approaches provide valuable insights into disease mechanisms and development they often lack physiological protein expression levels and a humanized context of molecular interaction partners. The generation of human induced pluripotent stem (hiPS) cells from somatic cells provides access to virtually unlimited numbers of patient-specific cells for modeling neurological disorders in vitro. In this review, we focus on the current progress made in hiPS cell-based modeling of neurodegenerative diseases and discuss recent advances in the quality assessment of hiPS cell lines.