Harnessing induced pluripotent stem cells for the modeling and treatment of neurological disorders

摘要

A major hurdle in modeling human neurological disorders in vitro is the scarcity of human neuro-nal tissues that are available for research. Usually, postmortem tissues from deceased individuals or aborted fetuses are used to harvest neuronal cells; however, this approach is both technically challenging, and ethically controversial. Pluripotency is defined by the ability of a cell to differentiate into all the cells of the fetus, including all neural cell types. The isolation of pluripo-tent human embryonic stem cells (HESCs) from blastocyst-stage embryos has offered researchers a new tool: a cell-type that can both self-renew indefinitely in culture, as well as differentiate into any kind of cell of the human body .