underlying BPD [9–15]. A major caveat of post mortem brain studies, however, is the difficulty in differentiating disease etiology-associated changes (e.g. gene expression) from those caused by post-mortem artifact, life-long illness or prior drug treatment. Recent advances in human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, on the other hand, have the potential to address some of the shortcomings of postmortem studies. For example, iPSC-derived neurons from neurodegenerative diseases with Mendelian inheritance such as familial Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson’s disease recapitulate key pathological mechanisms associated with the disorders [16–18]. Interestingly, even in a complex psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia, iPSC-derived neurons have been shown to display morphological and gene expression changes that may be relevant to underlying disease biology [19,20].
