The cells produced by a team at Geneva University are the country's first to be developed without animal components, Swissinfo.com reported.

"For us it's a success. This line has been derived without exposing the cells to animal components, like foetal bovine serum, which is the case in most of the lines available in the different laboratories now," Marisa Jaconi, the project leader, said. "But we would have been happy even without this successful line. It was a great opportunity to start this project, to learn and to gain all the know-how of doing it."

A law passed in 2001 bans the freezing of embryos once they are past the earliest phase, the zygote or impregnated egg. But the law was amended in 2004 to allow embryos donated for research to be used until 2008.