Harvard scientists have produced a library of stem cells based on ordinary skin and bone marrow cells from patients, which allow researchers to study the cells that degenerate in patients who suffer from degenerative diseases and from many more diseases without ethical restrictions.

The new cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells, also known as iPS cells, are made using a new technique which reprograms cells, giving them all the qualities of embryonic stem cells, such as 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.

Doug Melton, a co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute said the new disease specific cell lines “represent a collection of degenerative diseases for which there are no good treatments and, more importantly, no good animal models for the most part in studying them,” according to the Associated Press.

A new laboratory has been created to serve as a repository for the cells, and to distribute them to other scientists researching the diseases, Melton said, according to the same source.

The new discovery allows researchers to study the disease in progress in a Petri dish. By comparing diseased cells to healthy cells in a Petri dish, scientists hope to understand what causes the disease and to test new drugs.

Last week, scientists at Harvard and Columbia universities announced that they created the first stem cell lines from skin samples provided by ALS patients. Researchers used a cellular programming recipe first developed by Shinya Yamanaka, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan. The technique “opens doors to making patient-specific stem cell lines,” said Dr. Kevin Eggan, principle faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and lead author of the study.

The finding supports the theory that almost any cell in the body can function as a stem cell and is capable of being reprogrammed into many different cells in the body.