The team of scientists from Harvard Medical School, Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the University of Washington, who managed to produce a library of stem cells based on ordinary skin and bone marrow cells from patients, said they would share the discovery with other researchers. A new laboratory has been created to serve as a repository for the cells, and to distribute them to other scientists researching the diseases, the AP noted.

They said the goal is not yet to treat anyone, but to open new doors to researchers who will have the chance to study the disease in progress in a Petri dish.

“They allow researchers ... to watch the disease progress in a dish, to watch what goes right or wrong,” said Harvard’s Dr. Doug Melton. “I think we’ll see in the years ahead that this opens the door to a new way of treating degenerative diseases.”

The discovery enables researchers to model thousands of conditions using classical cell culture techniques, said investigator George Daley.

The new cells, which are called iPS cells, are made using a technique pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan which reprograms cells, giving them the qualities of embryonic stem cells. Just like the ordinary stem cells, the new induced pluripotent stem cells could be cultured into any desired tissue, from heart muscle cells, and blood cells to brain cells.

The new method is an alternative to the technique which involves taking human eggs and it allows researchers to study generative diseases without ethical restrictions.