Animal tests, described in the journal Cell Stem Cell, have now used modified skin cells to repair the insulation.

BBC: Skin 'may restore' diseased MS brain

The other thing it does is it makes it extremely easy now to tailor a stem cell to an individual because all I have to do is get a few skin cells from you and then put in these magic factors, and suddenly I've got an embryonic stem cell line that's tailor made directly to you.

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Since that time, more advanced cloning technologies have evolved, including the iPS system of induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be grown from nearly any skin cell.

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After several days, the ball of cells that results contains a blanket of embryonic stem cells endowed with the genetic material of the donor skin cell, which have the ability to generate every cell type from that donor.

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Induced pluripotent stem cells can come from any cell in the human body, including skin cells, so they don't have the moral quandaries surrounding them.

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When the first iPS cells were developed two years ago in Japan and the United States, skin cells were reprogrammed to be able to have properties similar to a human embryonic stem cell.

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First came the remarkable work of Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, who showed it was possible, by activating just four genes, to take a mature cell (he used a bit of skin but other cells would work) and turn it into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell with the potential to become any other cell in the body of mouse or human.

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They took a sample of human skin cells and converted it into stem cells, which are capable of becoming any other type of cell in the body.

BBC: Skin 'may restore' diseased MS brain