Abstract
Schizophrenia is one of the major psychiatric disorders with the onset between late adolescence and early adulthood. Despite its high lifetime prevalence, about 1%, its pathobiology is still unclear. While many kinds of comprehensive researches had revealed a number of aspects of this disorder, there still existed some difficulties because of the methodological limitations such as inaccessibility of the live brain. However, the technology of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) allows us to investigate living brain cells from patients with neuropsychiatric disorders. There already reported some researches of iPSC-derived neurons from schizophrenia patients, and our group’s research also just getting underway. Since the technology of iPSC induction and neuronal induction from iPSCs are drastically improving, research using iPSCs will contribute to clarifying the pathobiology of neuropsychiatric disorders.
