First human monkey embryo developed – Business AM

Scientists were able to develop monkey embryos after injecting human stem cells. A new milestone in a rapidly developing field Ethical questions Summons. To write nature.

A team of scientists injected monkey embryos with human stem cells and watched them develop. They watched human and monkey cells divide and grow together in a petri dish.

At least three embryos survived until 19 days after fertilization. The research has been published in Academic journal cell.

Java monkeys

“Every embryo contains human cells that multiply and differentiate to varying degrees,” said Juan Carlos Ispisa Belmonte, an evolutionary biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and one of the researchers who led the work.

Researchers fertilized eggs from Java monkeys (Macaca fascicularis). Six days after fertilization, the team injected 132 embryos with human pluripotent stem cells, which can grow into a range of cell types inside and outside the fetus.

Each of the embryos developed unique combinations of human and monkey cells and degraded at varying rates: eleven days after fertilization, 91 of them were alive, and this decreased to 12 embryos on the seventeenth day and 3 embryos on the nineteenth day.

human organs

Ethicists wonder about the combination of human cells and closely related primate embryos. “ Some people see you creating entities that are morally ambiguous, ” says Ensu Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. nature.

He says the research team has fully adhered to current guidelines. “I think they paid a lot of attention to compliance with the regulations and ethical issues.”

The ultimate goal of this research is to create human organs that can be transplanted. (MAh)