The widespread hope for a new era of prevention and treatment for chronic neurological disorders, such as stroke, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease, will likely depend on the discovery of new CNS drugs. However, currently over 99% of candidate CNS drugs fail in clinical tests because of side effects and/or an inability to cross the BBB (Alavijeh et al., 2005). Our human iPSC-derived BBB shows promise as a model for CNS drug development at the pre-clinical stage. BBB models constructed from CNS disease patient-specific iPSCs should also provide new insights into how vascular dysfunction contributes to CNS diseases.
