One way potentially to bypass the difficulties that arise with the use of animal and post-mortem human brain models is to derive pluripotent cells from samples taken from living participants, and then differentiate these pluripotent cells into the tissue of interest. Takakashi and Yamanaka reported that it was possible to reprogram mouse or human fibroblasts into a pluripotent state by virally introducing 4 factors into the cell culture, generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells (Takahashi et al., 2007, Takahashi and Yamanaka, 2006). Subsequently, other groups have used protocols developed for human embryonic stem (hES) cells to differentiate iPS cells into neural cultures containing neurons and glia (Hu et al., 2010, Johnson et al., 2007). iPS cell derivation and neural differentiation provides a minimally invasive method to obtain and examine subject-specific neural tissue.
