https://www.ibiology.org/humandiseas...

Using neurons made from the stem cells of children with neurodevelopmental diseases to make medicines to treat incurable diseases.

Overview:
Drug discovery for diseases of the nervous system is difficult. Although mouse models are helpful to study many human diseases, they have serious limitations for understanding neurological and psychiatric disease. Dolmetsch describes a method developed by his group to produce induced pluripotent stem cellderived neurons from patients. Using these iPSC neurons, they can identify molecular defects associated with a neurodevelopmental disease and then identify medicines to treat those diseases.

About the Speaker:
Ricardo Dolmetsch moved from Colombia to the United States at age 17 to attend university. He received his BSc from Brown University, his PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University and he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. Dolmetsch is a faculty member in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University. He is also the Global Head of Neuroscience at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research where he is using new technologies to develop treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.