A neurological disorder is any disorder of the body's nervous system, which includes the brain, spinal cord and nerves throughout our body. It is well established that the incidence of neurological disorder increases as people age. Our rapidly aging society has witnessed far more cases of nervous system diseases ever. The World Health Organization estimated in 2006 that neurological disorders and their sequelae affect as many as one billion people worldwide.

Dr. LIU Guang-hui is a young professor at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He summarized the most recent advances in both reprogramming methods and advantages of induced neural stem cells (iNSCs) and pointed out that induced neural stem cells is a new tool for studying neural development and neurological disorders.

As a cell-based therapy for treating neurodegenerative diseases, direct lineage conversion of somatic cells into induced neurons (iNs) has attracted a lot of attention. Compared to iNs, iNSCs derived from single colonies provide pure homogenous cell line that is more suitable for both transplantation and scientific research. The self-renewal ability of iNSCs enables the dilution of aging-related hallmarks from the original somatic cells. Compared to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), the generation of iNSCs bypasses the “induced pluripotency” stage and thus helps to reduce the accumulated chromosomal abnormalities and then the risks of tumorigenesis.

With different combination of various transcription factors, different research groups had successfully generated iNSCs from somatic cells, such as mouse embryonic fibroblasts or mouse sertoli cells.

In his review article published in the latest issue of Cell Research, Dr. LIU not only provides enlightening discussion about the most advanced current research, but also gives directive suggestions for the future research of neural stem cell field. He suggests that for clinical application, the generation of expandable multipotent human iNSCs from human somatic resources is the focus of further exploration.