A team of scientists in the US and the UK has created the world's first synthetic human embryo-like structures from stem cells in a major scientific breakthrough. This will bypass the need for eggs and sperm.
Scientists say that these model embryos could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage, according to The Guardian.
These embryo-like structures are at the very earliest stages of human development. While they lack a beating heart or a brain, they do contain cells that would typically give rise to the placenta, yolk sac and the embryo itself.
Prof Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, affiliated with the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology is leading the research. While speaking at the International Society for Stem Cell Research's annual meeting, she described how human embryo-like structures can be produced by reprogramming embryonic stem cells.
According to the media outlet, there is no near-term prospect of synthetic embryos being used clinically. It would be illegal to implant them into a patient's womb, and it is not yet clear whether these structures have the potential to continue maturing beyond the earliest stages of development.
Robin Lovell-Badge, the head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said, "The idea is that if you really model normal human embryonic development using stem cells, you can gain an awful lot of information about how we begin development, what can go wrong, without having to use early embryos for research."
Details of the latest work, from the Cambridge-Caltech lab are yet to be published in a journal paper.
Previously, Zernicka-Goetz's team showed that stem cells from mice could be encouraged to self-assemble into early embryo-like structures with an intestinal tract, the beginnings of a brain and a beating heart.
"Unlike human embryos arising from in vitro fertilization (IVF), where there is an established legal framework, there are currently no clear regulations governing stem cell-derived models of human embryos. There is an urgent need for regulations to provide a framework for the creation and use of stem cell-derived models of human embryos," James Briscoe, associate research director at the Francis Crick Institute, said in a statement.
Zernicka-Goetz told CNN the embryo-like structures her lab has created are also the first to have germ cells that would go on to develop into egg and sperm.
"I just wish to stress that they are not human embryos," Zernicka-Goetz said. "They are embryo models, but they are very exciting because they are very looking similar to human embryos and are the very important path towards the discovery of why so many pregnancies fail, as the majority of the pregnancies fail around the time of the development at which we build these embryo-like structures."
Researchers are in hope that these model embryos will shed light on the "black box" of human development.
