London, June 15 (EFE). A team of scientists has managed to create artificial human embryos using stem cells, without having to resort to eggs or sperm, a revolutionary advance that could help investigate genetic disorders.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, Thursday, this is an innovative step forward in science and research that nevertheless raises, at the same time, ethical dilemmas and legal problems.
Experts from the UK and the US suggest that these model embryos, which are similar to those found in the early stages of human development, could provide, for example, a “crucial window” into the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage.
These structures do not contain a beating heart or the beginning of a brain, although they do include the cells that would form the placenta, yolk sac, and the fetus itself.
“We can create models similar to human embryos by reprogramming cells,” says Professor Magdalena Zernica-Goetz, of the California Institute of Technology (USA) in an intervention conducted as part of the annual conference in Boston of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
According to this, there is currently no short-term prospect of using these artificial embryos clinically and it would be illegal to implant them in the patient’s uterus.
It is also not yet clear whether these structures have the potential to continue to mature beyond the earliest stages of development.
In another appearance at the conference, Robin Lovell-Badge, chair of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the Francis Crick Institute (London), said, “The idea is that if we use stem cells to model normal human embryonic development, you can get a lot of information about how development begins, and what can go wrong, without having to use early stage embryos for research.”
(c) EFE Agency
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