A team of researchers in the United States and United Kingdom say they have created the world’s first synthetic human embryo-like structures from stem cells, bypassing the need for eggs and sperm.
These embryo-like structures are at the very earliest stages of human development: They don’t have a beating heart or a brain, for example. But scientists say they could one day help advance the understanding of genetic diseases or the causes of miscarriages.
“We can create human embryo-like models by the reprogramming of [embryonic stem] cells,” Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, of the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology, said in an address on Wednesday at the International Society for Stem Cell Research annual meeting in Boston.
This research, yet to be published in a journal, raises legal and ethical questions, as many countries currently lack regulations looking at the creation and manipulation of synthetic embryos.
“Unlike human embryos arising from in vitro fertilisation (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,” CNN reported James Briscoe, associate research director at the Francis Crick Institute, saying in a statement.