Cindy E McKinney and Stephan L Brown
Many human diseases arise as the result of DNA mutations in the patient’s genome. The neurodevelopmental diseases of early childhood have proven difficult to model due to lack of access to embryonic tissue and ethical concerns. Federal restrictions on the use of embryonic material also preclude studying some stages of neurodevelopmental disease. The onset of illness in utero or early childhood is frequently preceded by normal development of critical milestones. Recent work has led to methodologies to transform somatic cells to embryoniclike stem cells using four exogenous transcription factors. With this approach, it is now possible to validate the use of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) to model aspects of neurodevelopmental diseases using a patient’s donated cells or genome editing of hiPSC cells to contain known disease mutations. The reprogramming of somatic cells to hiPSC requires dedifferentiation and resetting of epigenetic signatures in the genome. The newest approaches are evaluating propagating the cells in three dimensions on artificial matrices to recapitulate regional neural cyto-architecture within the brain. Newer genome editing techniques that rely on site-specific sequence recognition by synthetic enzymes can be used to generate hiPSC neurodevelopmental disease models. A hiPSC disease model has several advantages, the patient’s own cells may be transduced to provide the investigative cell model and compared to other patient’s cells with the same disease. Additionally, a hiPSC model addresses some of the concerns about gene engineered animal models accurately recapitulating human disease since the model context is a patient-specific human cell line. Here we review the emerging use of hiPSC to model neurodevelopmental diseases.
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