June 15, 2023 3:52 pm
They don’t have a beating heart or brain, but do include cells that would normally go into the placenta
The embryos developed by the team of scientists led by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, do not have a beating heart or a brain, but include cells that would normally form the placenta, the yolk sac and the embryo itself. There is no short-term prospect of synthetic embryos being used in the clinic. It would be illegal to implant them in a patient’s uterus, and it’s not yet clear whether these structures can continue to mature beyond the earliest stages of development.
Full details of the Cambridge-Caltech lab’s latest work have not yet been published in a scientific journal. But, speaking at the annual conference of theInternational Society for Stem Cell Research in Boston, Zernicka-Goetz described the embryo cultivation at a stage just above the equivalent of 14 days of development for a natural embryo. “Ours is the first human embryo model that involves egg and sperm precursor cells, and is created entirely from embryonic stem cells,” she said.