For the first time, cloning technologies have been used to generate stem cells that are genetically matched to adult patients.

Fear not: No legitimate scientist is in the business of cloning humans. But cloned embryos can be used as a source for stem cells that match a patient and can produce any cell type in that person.

Researchers in two studies published this month have created human embryos for this purpose. Usually an embryo forms when sperm fertilizes egg; in this case, scientists put the nucleus of an adult skin cell inside an egg, and that reconstructed egg went through the initial stages of embryonic development.

This is a dream that weve had for 15 years or so in the stem cell field, said John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Gearhart first proposed this approach for patient-specific stem cell generation in the 1990s but was not involved in the recent studies.

Stem cells have the potential to develop into any kind of tissue in the human body. From growing organs to treating diabetes, many future medical advances are hoped to arise from stem cells.

Scientists wrote in the journal Cell Stem Cell this month that they used skin cells from a man, 35, and another man, 75, to create stem cells from cloned embryos.

We reaffirmed that it is possible to produce patient-specific stem cells using a nuclear transfer technology regardless of the patients age, said co-lead author Young Gie Chung at the CHA Stem Cell Institute in Seoul, South Korea.

On Monday, an independent group led by scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute published results in Nature using a similar approach. They used skin cells from a 32-year-old woman with Type 1 diabetes to generate stem cells matched to her.

Both new reports follow the groundbreaking research published last year by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and colleagues at Oregon Health & Science University in the journal Cell. In that study, researchers produced cloned embryos and stem cells using skin cells from a fetus and an 8-month-old baby.

Its a remarkable process that gives us these master cells, these stems cells that are essentially the seeds for all of the tissues in our bodies, said George Daley, director of the Stem Cell Transplantation Program at Boston Childrens Hospital, who was not involved in the recent studies. Thats why its so important for medical research.

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Cloning used to make stem cells from adult humans