Human Blastocyst-Like Structures Made in the Lab

Good news!

"... the human blastoid, a blastocyst-like, three-dimensional model system that recapitulates many of the events in the first 10 days of human development—and doesn’t require any starting material from a human embryo. ..."

"Limited access to embryos has hampered the study of human embryogenesis and disorders that occur during early pregnancy. Human pluripotent stem cells provide an alternative means to study human development in a dish ..."
we developed an effective three-dimensional culture strategy with successive lineage differentiation and self-organization to generate blastocyst-like structures in vitro. These structures—which we term ‘human blastoids’—resemble human blastocysts in terms of their morphology, size, cell number, and composition and allocation of different cell lineages. Single-cell RNA-sequencing analyses also reveal the transcriptomic similarity of blastoids to blastocysts.

Human Blastocyst-Like Structures Made in the Lab | The Scientist Magazine® Two new papers describe the generation of so-called blastoids, which could avoid the use of embryonic cells and make studying early human development much more accessible.

Here are the links to the underlying research articles:

Blastocyst-like structures generated from human pluripotent stem cells (no public access)

Modelling human blastocysts by reprogramming fibroblasts into iBlastoids (no public access, but the The Scientist article above let's you access the PDF file)