Using human induced pluripotent stem cells for modeling schizophrenia, a psychiatric disorder

There are inherent difficulties in developing well-defined experimental systems to study complex psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. Advances have been made utilizing animal models; however, limitations in their ability to fully recapitulate the human disease exist. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from patients have the potential to revolutionize disease modeling for schizophrenia research and to provide a valuable resource for identification of crucial molecular pathways, biomarkers and for therapeutic drug screening.