From blood cells to babies

Dylan Stoll | Copy Editor

Featured image courtesy of Unsplash

Imagine a world where somebody could collect a sample of your blood, take it to a laboratory and make a child from it.  Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, not exactly.

Researchers from Kyoto University and Kyushu University in Japan, led by Mitinori Saitou, have managed to produce the precursor to a human egg cell by manipulating a sample of a woman’s blood. Known as in vitro gametogenesis—the process by which egg and sperm are made in a petri dish—the discovery is being hailed as a bold step forward in a more controversial frontier of biomedical research—test tube babies.

“I think this is an important step, but it’s one of several steps that will be necessary before eggs and sperm made from stem cells will be usable,” Henry Greely, director for the center of law and the biosciences at Stanford University, told Science Alert.

But how does the process work, exactly? To simplify, human blood cells were first turned into stem cells, and then into what are called human primordial germ cell-like cells (hPGCLC). From there, the hPGCLCs are incubated with mouse ovary cells over a period of four months. During that time period, the hPGCLCs became oogonia—the precursor to a human egg cell.

This research could lead to advancements in the reproductive industry such as producing children from infertile or same-sex parents and even from the DNA of a deceased person.

But they may have opened a Pandora’s box of sorts, as the research could lead to issues of law, specifically in the case of consent. Ronald Green, a bioethicist at Dartmouth said, “it could open the door for cloning people who may not have given their consent.

“A woman might want to have George Clooney’s baby and his hairdresser could start selling his hair follicles online. So we suddenly could see many, many progenies of George Clooney without his consent.”

On top of that, even more complications arise. Serious genetic diseases may become more prevalent in the children of such eggs, as there is still much to be understood as to how these eggs will grow when fertilized.

Despite all the challenges ahead, Saitou said that he hopes to eventually bring the oogonia through more stages of maturation, by incubating the hPGCLCs in human embryonic ovary cells.

However successful they may be, there is no denying that Saitou and his team had a tremendous impact in pushing this field forward. Eli Adashi, a former dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University said, “Considering how difficult this has been in a human, [this new study] in a way broke the ice. When I saw this, I said to myself, ‘you know, this [field] is moving.’ “