Scientists have just grown the world's first artificial 'embryo'

Artificial human life will soon be grown in a laboratory. Scientists have now created "artificial embryos" using stem cells from mice. They hope that their work will help improve fertility treatments.

A team at Cambridge University mixed two kinds of mouse stem cells and placed them on a 3D scaffold. After roughly four days of growth in a tank of chemicals designed to mimic conditions inside the womb, the cells formed the structure of a living mouse embryo.

This breakthrough, which has reportedly been described as a ‘masterpiece’ in bioengineering, can possibly allow scientists to grow artificial human embryos in the lab, without a sperm or an egg. These artificial embryos have been created using genetically engineered stem cells coupled with extra-embryonic trophoblast stem cells (TSCs) which form in the placenta in a normal pregnancy.

Previous attempts to grow embryos using only one kind of stem cell proved unsuccessful because the cells would not assemble into their correct positions. But then, scientists discovered that when they added the second 'placental' stem cell, the two types began to talk to each other, which resulted in telling each other where to go.

Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz from the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at Cambridge, who lead the research said, “We think that it will be possible to mimic a lot of the developmental events occurring before 14 days using human stem cells using a similar approach to our technique using mouse stem cells.” She also added that the team is very optimistic that this will allow them to study key events of this critical stage of human development without actually having to work on embryos.