A "revolutionary" approach to creating stem cells in the laboratory could open up a new era of personalised medicine, it is claimed.
Scientists have shown it is possible to reprogram cells into an embryonic-like state simply by altering their environment.
It means cells can have their developmental clock turned back without directly interfering with their genes - something never achieved before.
The cells become "pluripotent", having the potential ability to transform themselves into virtually any kind of tissue in the body, from brain to bone.
Reprogramming a patient's own cells in this way is seen as the holy grail of regenerative medicine, raising the prospect of repairing diseased and damaged organs with new healthy tissue that will not be rejected by the immune system.
Present methods of performing the same trick involve genetic manipulation, which carries with it a serious risk of triggering cancer.
But the new method described in the journal Nature requires no genetic tweaking.
Scientists simply bathed immature white blood cells from mice in an acidic solution for 25 minutes.
Tests showed that, stressed in this way, some of the cells lost their "blood identity" and produced gene markers typical of early embryos.
When these cells were transferred to a special growth-promoting culture medium they began to multiply and acquired features typical of embryonic stem cells.
The scientists, led by Dr Haruko Obokata, from the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, named their creations "stap" (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency) cells.
Professor Chris Mason, chair of regenerative medicine bioprocessing at University College London, said: "If it works in man, this could be the game-changer that ultimately makes a wide range of cell therapies available using the patient's own cells as starting material - the age of personalised medicine would have finally arrived."
Although pluripotent embryonic stem cells can be "mined" from discarded early-stage human embryos, this practice is controversial.
Much attention has focused on an alternative solution, creating so-called induced pluripotent stem cells by reprogramming the genes of adult cells.
So far stap cells have only been made from immature mouse cells.
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