The embryos, which are not the product of sexual reproduction using sperm and egg cells, offer the promise of important insight into genetic disorders.
The research hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal but was instead presented by Professor Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, of the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge, in an address to the International Society for Stem Cell Research’s annual conference in Boston this month. It follows up other similar attempts at creatingand monkeys, but this is the first time a synthetic embryo has been made from human stem cells.
The synthetic embryos in question do not have a digestive tract, a heartbeat, or the beginnings of a brain, but they do include cells that could go on to form those structures. Earlier attempts with animal embryos have not“That’s very difficult to answer. It’s going to be hard to tell whether there’s an intrinsic problem with them or whether it’s just technical,” Lovell-Badge said.
The speed of progress on this front has prompted many, including Żernicka-Goetz, to push for regulatory guardrails around the development and use of synthetic embryos in a clinical setting, those such a development still looks to be a long way off. “If the whole intention is that these models are very much like normal embryos, then in a way they should be treated the same,” Lovell-Badge said. “Currently in legislation they’re not. People are worried about this.”