The centre, in Hertfordshire, will contain two stem cell lines developed by teams at King's College London and the Centre for Life in Newcastle.

Stem cells offer hope of new ways to repair and replace diseased and damaged body tissues, the BBC said.

Among the first deposits in the bank are two continually-replicating "lines" of embryonic stem cells derived from spare embryos donated by women who have undergone in-vitro fertilization, said the Independent.

Work on embryonic stem cells is opposed by anti-abortion groups and certain religious groups who argue that it is akin to using babies for spare parts. Researchers only use embryos less than 14 days old to supply stem cells, it said.

The bank, based at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) and funded by a £40m grant, will accept embryonic cells as well as those from adults and from foetuses, said The Guardian.

The aim of the new cell bank is to store, characterise and clone cells and distribute them as required to researchers around the world. It will bring cures a step closer for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, diabetes, muscular dystrophy and heart disease.

But it also puts Britain at odds with anti-abortion groups and the United States, where president George Bush has banned the use of public funds for stem cell research, the paper said.

Stem cells are the body's master cells. Those found in embryos are most prized by scientists because they can turn into every part of the human body. Adult stem cells are thought by scientists to be less versatile than their embryonic equivalents, it said.

Extracting them from early-stage embryos, however, is extremely difficult and very few researchers around the world have been successful. The new cell bank is partly designed to overcome this problem by making the stem cells widely available, the newspaper said.

The European Parliament voted last year to consider the possibility that all types of cloning should be made illegal.

'Any such move would have a serious impact on stem cell research: one of its goals is to grow replacement tissue that perfectly matches a patient's own. In order to do this, researchers need stem cells from an embryo cloned from the patient's cells.Scientists acknowledge, however, that the technology used to clone cells for this purpose - so-called therapeutic cloning - could easily be misused to actually clone people,' said the paper.