Scientists at Harvard and Columbia universities announced yesterday that they created the first stem cell lines from skin cells taken from a sick person. Then they converted some of those stem cells into the motor neurons, the brain cells that degenerate in patients who suffer from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Previously, researchers used skin samples provided from healthy subjects to create stem cells.

The advance, published yesterday in the journal Science, marks a step forward toward fulfilling the technique developed during the last two years that gives human stem cells from the patients with a genetic disease the same force as those from skin samples provided by healthy subjects.

The scientists from Harvard University and Columbia University produced the stem cells using patches of skin removed from the arm of an 82-year-old woman and her 89-year-old sister, who share a rare genetic mutation that causes about 2% of ALS cases.

“We now have in the culture dish cells which have the same genetic makeup as do the patients,” said Christopher Henderson, a researcher at Colombia University in New York and co-author of the study.

This allows researchers the opportunity to study the brain cells that degenerate in patients with Lou Gehring’s disease and to test whether cells from elderly patients could be reprogrammed. Researchers say the same technique can be used to study many other genetic diseases.

Researchers used a cellular programming recipe first developed by Shinya Yamanaka, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan.

“This opens the door to being able to make patient-specific stem cell lines from diseases which affect people very late in life, like Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease,” said Eggan, the study’s senior author.

ALS is caused by the degeneration of motor neurons. ASLS involves the progressive degeneration of spinal cord motor neurons that can lead to paralysis of limbs and respiration. The stem cells might be used to create motor neurons that could replace the diseased cells in patients who suffer from genetic diseases.

Stem cells have the potential to develop into many different cell types in the body, serving as a sort of repair system for the body. They can divide without limit to replace other cells in the body as long as the person or the animal is still alive. Unlike other cells such as muscle cells, blood cells, or nerve cells, the stem cells divide and each new cell may remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a specialized function.

Such cells provide a way to take ALS studies “out of the patient and into the petri dish,” Harvard biologist Kevin Eggan said at a press conference. The ALS Association estimates 30,000 people in the United States have the disease. By comparing diseased cells to healthy cells in a Petri dish, scientists hope to understand what causes the disease and to test new drugs.

The technique which uses skin cells taken from patients, reprogramming them into embryonic-like stem-cells “is so much easier, [with] so many fewer restrictions and problems – ethical as well as others,” than the technique that involves taking human eggs, Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell scientist and member of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge was quoted as saying by boston.com.