Artificial insemination—the union of sperm and egg ex utero—is not a new technology, but the development of artificial wombs has continued to advance. In particular, a common problem is the acceptance of the fertilized embryo into uterine tissue has often been a failure point… until now when an “organoid” of such tissue was combined with a fertilized embryo ex utero:
“At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses gently into the receptive lining of the uterus and then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of a future placenta appear.
“This is implantation—the moment that pregnancy officially begins.
“Only none of it is happening inside a body. These images were captured in a Beijing laboratory, inside a microfluidic chip, as scientists watched the scene unfold.
“The reports—two from China and a third involving a collaboration among researchers in the United Kingdom, Spain, and the US—show how scientists are using engineered tissues to better understand early pregnancy and potentially improve IVF outcomes.
“‘You have an embryo and the endometrial organoid together,’ says Jun Wu, a biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, who contributed to both Chinese reports. ‘That’s the overarching message of all three papers.’”
While some are concerned with treating human life with such lack of moral concern or ethical restraints, the possibility of helping to cure many forms if infertility in humans or even increasing the possibility of pregnancy for endangered species is intriguing.
“In your basic IVF procedure, an egg is fertilized in the lab and allowed to develop into a spherical embryo called a blastocyst—a process that takes a few days. That blastocyst then gets put into a patient’s uterus in the hope it will establish itself there and ultimately become a baby.
“In the new reports, it’s that initial bond between mother and embryo that is being reproduced in the lab. ‘IVF means in vitro fertilization, but now this is the stage of in vitro implantation,’ says Matteo Molè, a biologist at Stanford University whose results with collaborators in Europe are among those published today. ‘Considering that implantation is a barrier [to pregnancy], we have the potential to increase the success rate if we can model it in the laboratory.’”
Of course, the real advantage of this is when it will be used with genetically engineered catgirl embryos to mass produce them for domestic ownership!
A little mood music:
