Researchers from California say they have improved a groundbreaking technique that reprograms skin cells back to the embryonic state, making the procedure safer by relying less on the use of viruses and genetic modification.
The technique, first used last year by teams led by James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, turned back a cell’s developmental clock by inserting four genes into the cell using a virus.