Belief in prostheses
An artificial embryo with a brain was created in the laboratory
By Kai Stoppel
08/25/2022, 5:13 PM
A research team creates living constructs in the lab without eggs or sperm. It has a brain and a beating heart: it’s an artificial mouse embryo. This could pave the way for the production of artificial donor organs for humans.
In Germany alone, thousands of people are currently waiting years for organ transplants. However, a new research breakthrough could pave the way for artificial donor organs created in the lab. For the first time, researchers in Great Britain have succeeded in creating artificial mouse embryos from stem cells, which form the basis of the brain, beating heart and almost every other organ in the body.
Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, professor of mammalian developmental and stem cell biology at the University of Cambridge, said: “Our mouse embryo model not only develops a brain, but also a beating heart and all the components that will later make up the body. “It’s incredible that we’ve come this far.” Their results are published in the special issue “nature” Published.
Instead of egg cells and sperm, the researchers used stem cells, which can develop into any type of cell in the body, to create model embryos. They used three different types of stem cells, which play important roles in early mammalian development. One type becomes the body and its organs, while the other two types become the placenta and yolk sac and support fetal development.
Stem cells “talk” to each other
To guide the growth of their artificial embryos, the researchers combined stem cells from all three tissue types in the right proportions and in the right environment, encouraging their growth and communication with each other. Researchers finally got stem cells to “talk” to each other. As a result, the cells self-assemble into an artificial nucleus.
“What makes our work so exciting is that the resulting knowledge can be used to develop the perfect artificial human organs to save lives currently lost,” Zernicka-Coetz said. “Using knowledge of how adult organs are made, they can be manipulated and cured.”
The findings suggest that many embryos fail to develop early in pregnancy, potentially saving life in the future. This often happens when the three types of stem cells start sending each other mechanical and chemical signals that tell the embryo to develop properly. “One can now understand why so many pregnancies fail and how to prevent it,” Zernicka-Goetz said.
Embryos are still short lived
were already in the trade journal in early August “Go” Similar research results have been published by an Israeli research group. The studies “demonstrate that artificial embryos similar to mouse embryos can be created outside the uterus,” said Jesse Weinvliet of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, who was not involved in the research. According to Veenvliet, performance is still limited. Additionally, although the resulting structures look like embryos, they are imperfect and have clearly visible defects. The survival time was as short as eight-and-a-half days, as in the Cambridge study.
Nevertheless, Veenvliet sees the work of Zernicka-Goetz’s group as an important starting point for further research: “I believe that there will be a species to develop the first human structures,” says the scientist. This is not easy because of important differences in the development of mice and humans. The question, however, is when these findings will be transferred from mouse stem cells to human stem cells.
In Germany, the Embryo Protection Act has so far banned experiments on human embryos. However, the legal classification of artificial embryos is not universally clear. In the future, it will increasingly depend on the degree to which they resemble developing human beings and accordingly be classified as human embryos.
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