By adding three genes, Stanford University School of Medicine scientists transformed mouse skin cells in a laboratory dish directly into functional nerve cells without first becoming a pluripotent type of stem cell (a slower procedure).

The finding could revolutionize the future of human stem cell therapy and recast our understanding of how cells choose and maintain their specialties in the body.

Quickly making neurons from a specific patient may allow researchers to study particular disease processes such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or heritable mental diseases in a laboratory dish, or one day to even manufacture cells for therapy.