In the study led by Professor G.V. Shivashankar, deputy director at the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore and the Firc Institute of Molecular Oncology in Italy, the iPSCs were made using only mechanical cues from the mature cells' environment.

Said Prof Shivashankar: "In our work, we've been looking at how cells are affected by the local mechanical cues they would receive in the body... And this study shows that cells have this ability to reverse themselves (into stem cells), driven by mechanical constraints, and we can actually make induced pluripotent stem cells out of these constraints."