This Perspective will focus on identifying clinically-realistic near- and intermediate-term opportunities for cell-based repair of brain disease, using both endogenous mobilization and transplant-based strategies, with an emphasis on the latter (Figure 1). By the same token, it will indicate those disorders perhaps less suitable for near-term cell therapeutic development, whether by virtue of their multicellular or multicentric nature, their especially challenging or poorly understood disease environments, or their need for cell types refractory to clinical scale development. The emphasis of this Perspective is thus on identifying clinical targets that are realistic based not only on our ability to produce cells of defined phenotype, but also on our current understanding of the clinical tractability of each candidate disease target, and just as importantly, on our assessment of already available treatment approaches that may narrow the pool of patients for whom cell therapeutics would be appropriate. A number of excellent reviews have recently appeared that have discussed pluripotent cell-based in vitro models of neural disease (Marchetto et al., 2011; Merkle and Eggan, 2013) and CNS drug development (Sandoe and Eggan, 2013), as
