Pluripotent stem cells and neurological diseases

Abstract

Most of our current knowledge about cellular phenotypes related to neurological diseases was gathered from studies performed in brain tissue collected postmortem. These samples often represent the end-stage of the disease process and may not represent a fair picture of how the disease developed over time. Futhermore, under these conditions, the pathology may as well be a secundary effect of the disease process or even due to the poor tissue condition and may not represent an authentic cellular phenotype. Likewise, animal models not always recapitulate the pathology from human disorders. In this article, I will present a critical view on the recent advances obtained from disease modeling using human pluripotent stem cells. The focus on cellular reprogramming as tool to generate patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells is justified by the great experimental potential, not only for disease modeling, but also as a biotecnological tool for future drug-screening platforms and personalized medicine.