Advances in modeling human diseases using induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cellular models

A major hurdle in developing relevant disease models for drug discovery is access to the healthy and diseased tissue of interest; induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology addresses this problem affording access to biologically relevant human tissues in essentially unlimited quantities. In this webinar, we will describe examples of how iPSC-derived disease cell models can be used to understand pathophysiological pathways in disease. Among the examples we will highlight are models of diseases induced in iPSC-derived cells from a healthy background; of epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases engineered into a healthy background; and of monogenic and idiopathic patient-derived models for cardiac diseases. We will briefly touch on current efforts aimed at generating large iPSC clone banks from disease backgrounds that will serve to expand access to human cell-based models. These human cell-based models can be used to explore the pathological phenotypes, genotype phenotype relationships, and environmental influences on a disease.