Abstract
Mental disorders cause not only a great pain and loss of quality of life for the patients themselves but also enormous losses for the society. However, the pathogenesis of mental disorders has yet to be elucidated, and the development of fundamental treatments has not been realized. One of the reasons for this is that it is difficult to establish experimental models which make it possible to analyze and verify the pathological mechanisms of mental disorders. To overcome this, iPS cells have been attracting attention. Looking back at the early days when iPS cell technology was applied to investigate the pathogenesis of mental disorders, most studies simply compared “healthy subjects vs. patients with mental disorders.” In recent years, the approach has shifted to be based on risk genomic variants for the development of mental disorders. Here, we introduce our research with the combined use of genomic information and iPS cells, and discuss pons and cons of iPS cells, as well as the potential of iPS cells in elucidating the pathogenesis of mental disorders and in drug discovery.
