Skin - the key to medical cures?

 For Stem Cell Treatment:

Skin is the largest organ in the body. It can be harvested to supply extra skin for burns victims and to grow cells that can form muscle and cartilage. However, skin might also hold the key to curing a variety of ailments with skin stem cells.
An Oxford University team announced that specially treated skin cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells, can be manipulated to generate the type of nerve cells that die in the brains of Parkinson's patients.
It may be possible to take a biopsy of skin from a patient, treat the cells in the lab, use them to study the disease, and design therapies to put back into the patient. This could take as little as five years time for well-understood illnesses, such as Parkinson's. Less understood diseases would take longer.
Adult stem cells taken from the patient are less likely to be rejected than cells from an adult donor or stem cells from embryos. Additionally, stem cells from the skin are easily accessible.
People have realised that skin has cells that can be manipulated into nerve cells and this could be the key to expand nerve cells for spinal cord injuries.
Professor Fiona Watt's work demonstrates how single stem cells can be induced to grow in the laboratory in order to identify the biological messages which control their ability to divide and mature into any kind of cell. Professor Watt's team, based at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research, University of Cambridge, are using this approach to uncover the biology of adult skin stem cells. This method can be applied to a wide range of embryonic and adult stem cells. She believes the full therapeutic potential found in skin stem cells is just starting to be appreciated.