SCIENCE BRIEFING
Times Staff and Wire Reports
Researchers have developed a way to make embryonic-like stem cells by soaking skin cells in genetically engineered proteins, a new step toward using ordinary cells to treat disease.
An international team led by Scripps Research Institute in California said Thursday that this was the safest method yet found to transform ordinary skin cells into what are called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells.
They reported their findings -- from research using mouse cells -- in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Several teams have been working to find ways to make ordinary cells behave like embryonic stem cells, bypassing the need to harvest them from embryos.
