WASHINGTON, May 19: A team of South Korean scientists has developed the first lines of patient-specific stem cells, designed to match the DNA of a specific person, according to a study released in the United States on Thursday.

The research marks a significant stride in work aimed at making it possible one day to transplant healthy cells into humans to replace cells ravaged by illnesses such as Parkinson’s and diabetes, said the researchers, whose work was published in the May 20 issue of Science.

The advance was made by the same Korean researchers who produced the first line of stem cells from a human embryo at 5-10 days — at that point called a blastocyst — which had been cloned. That research was announced in March 2004, also in Science.

Each of these 11 new lines of embryonic stem cells was created by transferring genetic material from a non-reproductive cell of a patient into a donated egg, or oocyte, fom which the nucleus had been removed. The method is called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SNCT, researchers said. Then oocytes with the genetic material of the patient were developed to the blastocyst stage, an early phase of embryo growth.—AFP