BIOTECHNOLOGY: The artificial uterus and the production of the embryo are coming! (Really, where is this world going ??)
BIOTECHNOLOGY: The artificial uterus and the production of the embryo are coming!
by Pierre-Alain Depauw
The New York Times recently published an article describing the state of artificial uterus experiments performed in Israel by the Weizmann Institute.
Scientists at the Israeli institute say they have developed mouse embryos in an artificial uterus, of which they are very proud.
In a study published in Nature, Dr. Jacob Hanna described the removal of embryos from the uterus of mice after five days of gestation and their development for another six days in an artificial uterus.
At this point, the embryos are about halfway through their development; a full pregnancy takes about 20 days. A person at this stage of development would be called an embryo. To date, Dr. Hanna and her colleagues have grown more than 1,000 embryos in this way.
"This is a really big achievement," said Paul Tesar, a developmental biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
As for Alexander Meissner, director of genome regulation at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, he said "getting this far is incredible" and that the study was "an important step".
However, the research has already gone beyond what the researchers described in the article. In an interview, Dr. Jacob Hanna said that he and his colleagues took fertilized eggs from the ovaries of female mice immediately after fertilization - on day 0 of development - and cultured them in the artificial uterus for 11 days.
Until now, researchers have been able to fertilize mammalian eggs in the laboratory and raise them for a short time. The embryos needed a living uterus. "Placenta mammals grow locked in the womb," said Dr. Tesar.
This has prevented scientists from answering fundamental questions about the early stages of development.
The sacred chalice of developmental biology understands how a single cell, a fertilized egg, can make all the specific types of cells in the human body and become 40 trillion cells," said Dr. Tesar. "Since the dawn of time, researchers have been trying to develop ways to answer this question."
For Dr. Jacob Hanna, this is enough to justify the development of an artificial uterus.
He spent seven years developing a two-part system that included incubators, nutrients and a ventilation system. The mouse embryos are placed in glass vials inside the incubators, where they float in a special nutrient fluid.
Image:
lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x1x8f8gss6M/YUYYPrnzg0I/AAAAAAAAMXY/2Ax2CUL2nnIpO18eodL7pd34y6lGW3e7ACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h426/image.pngSustainable embryos are rotated in a mechanical uterus.
The vials are attached to a wheel that rotates slowly so that the embryos do not stick to the wall, where they will warp and die. The incubators are connected to a ventilation machine that delivers oxygen and carbon dioxide to the embryos, controlling the concentration of these gases as well as the pressure and flow of the gas.
On the 11th day of development - more than half a pregnancy in mice - Dr. Jacob Hanna and his colleagues examined the embryos, about the size of an apple seed, and compared them to those growing in the womb. Laboratory embryos were identical, scientists have discovered.
By then, however, laboratory embryos had grown too large to survive without a blood supply. They had a placenta and a yolk sac, but the nutrient solution that fed them diffusion was no longer enough.
The next goal is to overcome this hurdle, Dr. Hanna said in an interview. It intends to use an enriched nutrient solution or an artificial blood supply connected to the placentas of the fetus.
"The ability to keep fetuses alive and reach mid-pregnancy" is a goldmine for us, "said Dr. Jacob Hanna.
Image:
lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ndZiylRKEfI/YUYYiS9p2PI/AAAAAAAAMXk/SkwMtLm1-HkBbyXbU7B3aJ4j9Z-U_oStgCLcBGAsYHQ/w360-h640/image.pngA growing mouse embryo in its glass vial.
A recent development offers another opportunity. The researchers created mouse embryos directly from mouse fibroblasts - connective tissue cells - making early embryos without starting from a fertilized egg.
Combine this development with the work of Dr. Jacob Hanna, and "now we do not need mice to study the development of mouse embryos," said Dr. Meissner. Scientists are able to make all the embryos they need from connective tissue.
But do not doubt it, the project will quickly expand beyond mice. Two other recent publications in Nature report efforts that are close to creating early human embryos in this way. Dr Meissner, wanting to be somewhat reassuring, said that the creation of human embryos would take place in a few years - if allowed. At present, scientists "generally" discontinue the study of human embryos 14 days after fertilization. Everything is in "general".
In the future, Dr. Tesar said, "it is not unreasonable to have the ability to develop a human fetus from fertilization to birth completely outside the womb."
Of course, such a science fiction scenario would scare many, Dr. Tesar admits, and trying to atone for himself adds that "if this is allowed, it will be judged by ethicists, legislators and society." In its campaign against Medically Assisted Reproduction (IVF) and Surrogacy, the CIVITAS movement claimed that the next step would be artificial insemination. He was right.
lh3.googleusercontent.com/-80cBdF6pm3s/YUYYxTPxTJI/AAAAAAAAMXo/lFFEDCp-jQgnmsuwt2XjagtRVNqNhPUCQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h336/image.pngSource in Greek:
thesecretrealtruth.blogspot.com/2021/09/blog-post_733.html?m=1
