Oliver Brüstle, from the University of Bonn, reported on several stable intermediate neural stem cell populations, which reflect different stages of CNS development and thus facilitate standardized generation of neurons and glia from human pluripotent stem cells (for review, see Karus et al., 2014). The latest addition to this assortment is radial glia-like neural stem cells, which, in contrast to developmentally earlier neural stem cell (NSC) populations, are endowed with a stable regional identity and enable efficient and more rapid oligodendroglial differentiation (Gorris et al., 2015). Brüstle also gave an update on the StemCellFactory project, an automated platform for parallelized industrial-scale cell reprogramming and neural differentiation (http://www.stemcellfactory.de/). He discussed several applications of PSC-derived NSCs. First, he presented recent comparisons of gamma secretase modulators, finding that amyloid precursor protein (APP) processing in hiPSC neurons is resistant to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-based gamma-secretase modulation (Mertens et al., 2013). This is in contrast to results from transgenic cell lines and mouse models, indicating the need to validate compound efficacy directly in the human cell type affected by disease. Second, Brüstle developed an hiPSC-based
