The genetic skin disease called epidermalsis bullosa or EB is a painful and devastating condition that causes the skin to blister and fall off at the slightest touch.

In the Liao family, two boys have the disease. But their mom won't rest until she finds a cure.

Little Nate Liao lives with constant, painful, blistering skin. He and his five-year-old brother Jake have the worst form of EB.

"If you can imagine the worst blister you may get on your foot—multiply that by a thousand," says the boys’ mother, Theresa.

Theresa Liao and her husband Roger both carry the gene for EB. For two of their four sons, it means enduring years of painful wounds that lead to an aggressive skin cancer.

There is no treatment. Theresa can only bandage the boys from head to toe. Already, Jake’s fingers have fused together from repeated scarring and he's lost all his toes.

"He had such severe problems with hands when he was born, you could literally blow on them and the skin would separate," Theresa says.

Theresa researched the disease and found the possibility of a cure using stem cells.

Doctors at the University of Minnesota studied lab mice with EB. The mice—like the Liao brothers—lack a protein that keeps skin together.

"It works like Velcro. Tiny fibrils keep the layers together and if they are not kept together, then the blisters will develop," says Jakub Tolar, M.D., Bone Marrow Transplant Physician.

Doctors infused healthy stem cells—by way of bone marrow transplants—into the sick mice, and the blisters disappeared.

After success in the lab, Nate became the first human to receive a bone marrow transplant to treat EB. His healthy three-year-old brother Jullian was the donor.

"You have to know that your child could die. But I know my child could die anyway and this was a chance to make it better," said Theresa.

It will be several more weeks before doctors know if the stem cell treatment worked, but Nate has shown some improvement.

Doctors believe this procedure could help people with a variety of skin disease.
Perfume study
Why is it that some women spray on way too much perfume?

According to research from Israel, it could be because they are depressed.

Researchers injected chemicals called "auto-antibodies" into female mice to induce depression.

Those chemicals ended up turning off the cells responsible for the animals' sense of smell.

The work is still preliminary, but researchers think the sense of smell in depressed women could be affected, which may lead them to overcompensate on perfumes.