In a potentially major breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists at MIT have developed a way to convert skin cells directly into brain cells extremely efficiently, without needing to go through the intermediate step of converting them to stem cells first.

One of the most amazing things to happen in biology in the last couple of years is cellular reprogramming. We learned how to convert one type of cell into another. In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka made a groundbreaking discovery that would win him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine just six years later: he found a new way to ‘reprogram’ adult,

Converting one type of cell to another—for example, a skin cell to a neuron—can be done through a process that requires the skin cell to be induced into a "pluripotent" stem cell, then differentiated into a neuron.

A new technique developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helps convert skin cells into neurons without needing to transform them first into stem cells. As demonstrated in mouse cells, this method makes it easier and more efficient to produce large-scale quantities of neurons.