Recent advances in stem cell biology and iPS cells provide an essential platform to model the cellular and molecular underpinnings of human neurological diseases in vitro that was until now impossible. The advent of human iPS cell research has yielded new clinical strategies for their use in regenerative therapy of damaged tissue and organs (Pei, Xu, Zhuang, Tse, & Esteban, 2010). Several patient-specific iPS cells have been produced to model various neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) (Bahmad et al., 2017; Marchetto et al., 2011). In addition, iPS cells have also been used to model and understand the molecular mechanisms underlying substance abuse phenotypes (Oni et al., 2016) including AUDs (Figure 1). To better illustrate the power of human iPS cell disease modeling, we will first discuss the use of iPS cells in two highly prevalent neuropsychiatric disorders, schizophrenia (SCZ) and bipolar disorder (BD).
