Researchers have transformed skin cells into beating heart tissue without going through an intermediate pluripotent stage. Reporting today at the International Society for Stem Cell Research meeting in San Francisco, Deepak Srivastava of the Gladstone Institute announced he had taken mouse skin cells, or fibroblasts, added a cocktail of heart-specific reprogramming factors and successfully created cardiac muscle, or cadiomyocytes, without first forming induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.

“More than half the heart is sitting right there as fibroblasts and those fibroblasts can be harnessed to make cardiomyocytes,” he told Nature Medicine.

So far, Srivastava has failed to reproduce the findings in human tissue, but one day he envisions creating a stent that slowly releases reprogramming factors in situ in people with heart problems to help form new muscle. The work will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Cell.

In a similar vein, on Wednesday Marius Wernig of Stanford University School of Medicine talked about a study, published earlier this year in Nature, in which he created functioning neurons from mouse skin cells without an iPS cell intermediary. Again, the work has proven more difficult in human cells, but Wernig says that getting direct reprogramming to work will be vital to future cellular therapies because it should rapidly accelerate the production of patient-specific tissue.