Neuropsychiatric disorders affect a large proportion of the global population, and continues to affect more people every year. There is a tremendous need to identify pathophysiology of these disorders and find novel, targeted treatments. Major limitations in neuropsychiatric research include the lack of access to disease-specific cell types. iPSC technology offers new opportunities to model disease-relevant neural cells from patients. Over the past 5 years, a handful of groups have applied this technology toward studying mental disorders, including SCZ and BPD (Table 1). Remarkably, these groups have developed differentiation protocols capable of generating specific cell populations, such as GABAergic, serotonergic and dopaminergic neurons. Despite the exciting progress made in recent years, this represents only a fraction of the potential iPSC technology holds for unlocking insights into the cause of mental illness. Although our knowledge of the causes behind mental illness has lagged, iPSC technology will push boundaries in our ability to understand, diagnose and treat neuropsychiatric disorders.
