The first synthetic human embryos

The creation of synthetic human embryos from stem cells was announced at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, it is a very important event since about 4,000 scientists from around the world participate, the best and brightest scientists in stem cells and regenerative medicine from all over the planet were present at this meeting, there they reported and discussed the new advances they have made in their field.

The announcement was made by head of research Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz who has been working on creating living synthetic structures for more than 10 years, living synthetic structures may be a strained term, but early in this story researchers were working with cell structures very basic mother that are new and difficult to define in simple words.

Like everything in science, this team has been working on their research for a long time and in August of last year this same team of researchers presented the creation of synthetic mouse embryos, this achievement is confirmed, these embryos had a basic brain, a neural tube and a very simple heart, but that was capable of beating, all of this was achieved from a stem cell structure.

The synthetic mouse embryos had a development of eight and a half days, compared to the development of a natural mouse embryo from the moment of fertilization, the researchers did not go further with the synthetic embryo since the objective was to study the first stages of life without recourse and having to sacrifice animals during experiments.

A very important issue that you have to take into account in this story, synthetics have their limits, what is artificial is the structure of stem cells and how to make them assemble to create an embryo, stem cells themselves are not synthetic, yet We do not have the capacity to manufacture them from nothing, although we can grow them from other stem cells extracted from a living being.

What the researchers did in 2022 was to take natural embryonic stem cells from a mouse and reprogram them to develop in the right direction, creating the structure of a synthetic mouse embryo, which has now been achieved because they basically did the same thing, only Instead of mouse stem cells, they used human stem cells. They reprogrammed those human cells to develop into three distinct tissue layers.

In the first place, a yolk sac, which in the human embryo functions as the circulatory system in the early stages of development before beginning internal circulation, secondly, a placenta was created, which is the structure that provides oxygen and nutrients to the embryo and In Third, the embryo itself was created, the embryo-like structures were then cultured in the laboratory and developed to a state equivalent to just over 14 days of life, and there the scientists stopped there for two very powerful reasons.

The first, because it is the legal limit for studying human embryos in vitro, and the second, because it is unknown whether synthetic human embryos could become viable embryos if implanted in a woman's womb.

During the months of the development of a pregnancy, many things happen and there are many processes that we still know very little about. The synthetic embryo could surely fail and die or end up in a being that is far removed from what we understand as a human being.

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