Humanity has been dealing with alchemy for thousands of years. Some civilizations aimed to transform metals and create gold, while others aimed to make new discoveries that would extend human life. Today, there has been a development in medicine that will envy alchemists. Cambridge University scientists have managed to grow synthetic embryos without eggs and sperm using stem cells. Well what does it mean?
Scientists developed embryos using stem cells!
The research team, led by Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the University of Cambridge, succeeded in creating three embryos using stem cells, the body’s mother cells that can turn into almost any cell type in the body.
Here, they directed three types of stem cells found in early mammalian development to the point where they began to interact, allowing them to mimic their natural processes in vitro. At the end of the development process, beating hearts and functional brain structure emerged. Unlike previous studies, it was noted that the entire brain, including the front part, developed.
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Of course, the main aim of these studies is not to raise human beings by creating embryos. To be able to prolong human life by specializing in stem cells and to use them in treatment processes. For example, they can perform a heart transplant to someone with organ failure, which is developed in a synthetic environment and is unlikely to cause incompatibility, or they can repair brain tissue that was damaged as a result of an accident.
But these studies do not produce results in one day. Cambridge University scientists have also been working on stem cells for 10 years. Therefore, the developments that take place here will not enter our lives in the near future. Nevertheless, this and many similar studies will receive approval for human experiments in the coming years. It will take a little longer for it to reach the level that will save human life.
Making a statement on the subject, Zernicka-Goetz, Professor of Mammalian Development and Stem Cell Biology in the Department of Physiology, Development, Cambridge said:
Our mouse embryo model not only develops a brain, it also develops all the components that make up the body and a beating heart. It’s incredible that we’ve come this far. This has been our community’s dream for years and the main focus of our work for ten years, and we finally succeeded.
The stem cell embryo model is important because it provides accessibility to the developing structure at a stage that is normally hidden from us due to the tiny embryo being placed in the mother’s womb. This accessibility allows us to manipulate genes and understand their developmental role in a model experimental system.
This period of human life is very mysterious, so it’s quite special to be able to see how it is on a plate, to have access to these individual stem cells, to understand why so many pregnancies fail and how we can prevent this from happening. We looked at the dialogue that had to take place between different types of stem cells at that time, showing how it was formed and how it could go wrong.
This opens up new possibilities for studying neurodevelopmental mechanisms in an experimental model. In fact, we show proof of this principle in the article by disabling a gene already known to be necessary for the formation of the neural tube, the precursor of the nervous system, and for brain and eye development.
In the absence of this gene, synthetic embryos show exactly known defects in brain development, as in an animal carrying this mutation. This means we can begin to apply this kind of approach to many genes whose function is unknown in brain development.
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