Importantly, it is perhaps unsurprising that even with late-onset diseases, there are pathogenic changes occurring at an early point in disease progression that are detectable in iPS models, and can be reverted by pharmacological intervention (reviewed in (Avior et al. 2016)). Arguably, these early changes are more critical in terms of understanding and treating the disease. Studying such effects would facilitate discovery of biomarkers that identify those patients at risk and allow development of strategies to enable early, targeted intervention to prevent the disease. This is particularly important in situations such as neurodegeneration where, by the time patients present with the disease, they often have irreparable damage such as the loss of neurons, and for whom therapeutic intervention at this late stage may not be possible.
