The glaring potential of reprogramming technology resides in the future application for precision medicine including therapeutics for AUDs (Figure 1). iPS cell technology allows access to patient-specific cells for several distinct purposes: 1) In the situation where the function of the disease associated genetic mutation is in question, genome editing can be used to repair the “disordered” genetic components in iPS cells, differentiate these cells into the affected neuronal subtype(s) and be used to study the impact of specific genetic mutations; 2) In the long run, when more mechanistic insights have gained and more technologies have been developed, cell replacement therapy with “healthy” neurons could potentially be possible and current stage animal studies have shown this approach to be viable (Kriks et al., 2011; Yang et al., 2016). And finally, 3) directed differentiation of the patient-specific iPS cells into defined neuronal subtypes can be utilized for functional readouts, thus offering a novel platform for modeling the genetic (or epigenetic) contribution to familial or sporadic AUDs (Soliman et al., 2017). Alcohol abuse contributes to mortality and cancer development, on a global
