(300 WORDS MAX) Many diseases, including degenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease, result from the destruction of specific cell types. In order to develop effective treatments for these disorders, it is essential that we understand why these cells are lost and how to prevent their loss. The development of cell reprogramming technologies to generate patient-specific stem cell lines offers an unprecedented opportunity to develop these models and to probe molecular and cellular aspects of the disease. Once reprogrammed stem cell lines have been created from a particular individual, their self-renewal and differentiation capacity allow the production of a renewable supply of the particular human cell types necessary to study functional ramifications of an individual's genotype. We have generated an initial set of pluripotent iPS lines with mutations from patients diagnosed with familial early onset Alzheimer's disease (FAD). In continuation of this work, we aim to apply these new advances in cell reprogramming to generate in vitro human models common to both familial and sporadic Alzheimer's disease which will open new avenues for drug discovery.