Elie Dolgin | May 30, 2009 | 3 min read
For the first time, researchers have combined gene therapy and cellular reprogramming technologies in human cells to correct a genetic defect. After taking skin and hair cells from patients with a rare genetic disorder and fixing the aberrant mutation, the investigators successfully reprogrammed the cells to an embryonic-like state and then turned them into the very cell types that usually go awry, according to a linkurl:study;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature08129.ht