Created the first synthetic human embryos obtained from stem cells

2023-06-15 16:33:01

Created the world’s first synthetic human embryos, made from stem cells, bypassing the need for eggs and sperm. This was announced by a team of researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom. These embryo-like structures are in the very early stages of human development: they don’t have a beating heart or a brain, for example. But scientists say they could one day help improve understanding of genetic diseases or the causes of miscarriages.

The announcement came from the Congress of the Society for Stem Cell Research in Boston, where Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, biologist at CalTech and the University of Cambridge, illustrated the work, specifying that the research was accepted by a major scientific journal but has not yet been published. The news was anticipated by the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’.

The synthetic embryos developed in the lab, Zernicka-Goetz explained, were obtained and grown by programming individual human embryonic stem cells to develop into three distinct tissue types. They include cells that typically would go on to develop a yolk sac, a placenta and the embryo itself. Speaking to CNN, the biologist stressed that these synthetic embryonic structures are also the first to have germ cells that would later become eggs and sperm.

“I just want to emphasize that they are not human embryos,” Zernicka-Goetz said. “They are models of embryos, but they are very exciting because they look very similar to human embryos and are a very important step towards discovering why so many pregnancies fail. since most pregnancies fail in the period of embryo development”.

The researchers hope these embryo models shed light on the ‘black box’ of human development, the period after 14 days after fertilization, which is the limit set for scientists to grow and study embryos in the laboratory. At the same time, the research raises ethical and legal questions, many countries – including the United States – have no laws governing the creation or processing of synthetic embryos.