Significant challenges remain for developing preventive or curative approaches targeting ALD (8–11). This is in part due to a lack of human-relevant model systems to study alcohol effect on liver development and regeneration (12). In recent years, human-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have been generated from diverse human somatic cells (13–16), which can then be differentiated into a spectrum of mature human cell types including functional hepatocytes (17). This development enables us to access an unlimited supply of hepatocytes, which has been one of the major challenges in the past. Moreover, human iPSCs retain the same genetic information of the donor (i.e., patient) tissues, making iPSCs a promising resource to study human genetic or acquired diseases.
