Capturing Alzheimer’s disease genomes with induced pluripotent stem cells: prospects and challenges.

A crucial limitation to our understanding of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the inability to study the disease in live, human neurons. Patient autopsies are limited in supply and only represent the aftermath of disease. Rodents designed to mimic AD lack important features of the disease, and they have not been useful in modeling the sporadic form of AD, which is the form that the vast majority of patients have. The recent discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) provides a method to create a “disease in a dish,” where diseases can be studied in the laboratory and new drugs can be tested using live, human samples. In this review, we discuss the genetics of AD patients and the potential for iPSCs to capture the genomes of these individuals and generate relevant cell types. Specifically, we examine recent insights into the ability of iPSCs to faithfully maintain the genomes of their respective patients, advances in the ability to make neural cells from iPSCs, and the ability of iPSCs to create neurodegenerative diseases in a dish.