London, October 18 : An research team in the U.S. has made a major advance in repeatedly generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from the tiny number of keratinocytes attached to a single hair plucked from a human scalp. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who led the study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, said that the breakthrough provided a practical and simple alternative for the generation of patient- and disease-specific stem cells, which had been hampered by the low efficiency of the reprogramming process. The researcher also said that the new process could spare patients invasive procedures to collect...