Neurodegenerative disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cell research.

Neurodegenerative disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) research contributes to the following 3 areas; "Disease modeling", "Disease material" and "Disease therapy". "Disease modeling", by recapitulating the disease phenotype in vitro, will reveal the pathomechanisms. Neurodegenerative disease-specific iPSC-derived non-neuronal cells harboring disease-causative protein(s), which play critical roles in neurodegeneration including motor neuron degeneration in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, could be "Disease material", the target cell(s) for drug screening. These differentiated cells also could be used for "Disease therapy", an autologous cellular replacement/neuroprotection strategy, for patients with neurodegenerative disease. Further progress in these areas of research can be made for currently incurable neurodegenerative diseases. 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.