Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been washing my hands with vigilance to prevent the spread of germs. As a result, the skin on my hands have become calloused on some parts and mostly dry, with cuts and slight bleeding on occasion. I thought this was inconvenient, but when I learned about children with a rare genetic skin disease, I stopped feeling sorry for myself and dug a bit deeper into their plight. After all, my skin issues are just due to excessive hand washing (which everyone should be doing anyway!); these poor kids have to live with this painful disease, known as dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, for their entire lives.

Embryonic stem cells (ES cells) are pluripotent stem cells isolated from an inner cell mass of early-stage embryo-blastocysts. ES cells have a high differentiation potential., which means that they have the capacity to develop into whatever cell type the body needs depending on the signals received by the ES cell. At the same time, while ES cells are undifferentiated, they retain the potential to infinitely replicate, making them highly attractive and renewable subjects for targeted cell therapy and regenerative medicine.