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Researchers at Harvard Medical School announced that they have created a stem cell library based on normal skin and bone marrow cells collected from several patients.
The creators of the library said that they plan to allow researchers from all around the world to have access to these cells, as they hope that by providing them with this material they will speed up the research regarding several disease as well as ways to cure them.
The stem cells come from patients with 10 different types of genetic disease. This type of diseases affect all the cells in a person's body and creating stem cells that carry the genetic fingerprint of a certain genetic disease could help scientists study it better.
According to the Washington Post, Doug Melton, a co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said about the stem cells that exist in the library that “this is a broader and more important collection of degenerative diseases for which there are no good treatments and, more importantly, no good animal models.
The cells will allow researchers access for the first time to cell types of interest, to watch the disease progress in a dish, to watch what goes right or wrong. . . We'll see in the years ahead that this opens the door to a new way of treating degenerative disease."
Even though the federal government does not approve to embryonic stem cell research, the stem cells from the new library were created in the lab using a technique that makes adult cells develop into primitive stage cells, so doing research on them does not offend any laws.
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