EDINBURGH - Sixteen years after Dolly the sheep was cloned
in Edinburgh, scientists in Scotland have made another
startling medical breakthrough.

Researchers at Edinburgh's Centre for Regenerative Medicine
have created brain tissue from patients suffering mental
illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.

"A patient's neurones can tell us a great deal about the
psychological conditions that affect them, but you cannot
stick a needle in someone's brain and take out its cells,"
the center's director, Professor Charles ffrench-Constant,
told the Guardian.

"However, we have found a way round that. We can take a skin
sample, make stem cells from it and then direct these stem
cells to grow into brain cells. Essentially, we are turning a
person's skin cells into brain."

The scientists hope that studying these manufactured brain
cells will reveal clues to the conditions of patients with
mental illnesses - a task that had been challenging in the
past.

"It is very difficult to get primary tissue to study until
after a patient has died," said the Royal Edinburgh
Hospital's Professor Andrew McIntosh, who is collaborating
with the center on the project.

"Even then, that tissue is affected by whatever killed them
and by the impact of the medication they had been taking for
their condition, possibly for several decades. So having
access to living brain cells is a significant development for
the development of drugs for these conditions," McIntosh
said.

If successful, the same methods could be used for other
organs, including the liver and heart.

Continue reading here:
Skin samples to create human brain cells

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