A University of Wisconsin research team has discovered a new way to turn human stem cells into skeletal muscle cells, the university announced this week.

Assistant Professor Masatoshi Suzuki, who led the team, previously turned stem cells into brain cells. The team adapted his methodology to make muscle cells.

“Researchers have been looking for an easy way to efficiently differentiate stem cells into muscle cells that would be allowable in the clinic,” Suzuki said in a statement. “The novelty of this technique is that it generates a larger number of muscle stem cells without using genetic modification, which is required by existing methods for making muscle cells.”

According to a release, the technique involves growing the pluripotent stem cells as floating spheres in high concentrations of fibroblast growth factor-2 and epidermal growth factor, both of which “urge” the stem cells to become muscle cells.