To mainly address the severe shortage of donor organs the world has been facing, scientists lead many chimeric experiments in the past decades. After trying to integrate human stem cells into sheep or pig embryos but without any satisfactory outcomes in the past, researchers took the study to the next step this time and obtained promising results by incorporating human stem cells into macaque monkey embryos (which are considered to share similar internal anatomy and organ size with humans).

For the current study, scientists fertilized macaque-derived eggs and grew them in culture. Six days after fertilization, they inserted 25 tagged human stem cells into the monkeys’ embryos and observed how each evolved into different human-monkey cell combinations. One unique result of this study is that the team was able to detect 132 growing human cells in the embryos that they were able to study for 19 days before they all deteriorated at varying rates and all killed by day 20 (Li, Esteban, Ji, Niu, & Belmonte, 2021).

These studies are considered to be a novel tool to biomedical research as their results could have a wide area of applications. Chimeric embryos provide a system that allows the close investigation of cell growth patterns and clonality but also the study of human diseases, drug discoveries, organ growing and transplantation, and many more research applications.

All these human-animal chimeras based studies lead to the rise of several questions from the ethicists of the field who don’t trust scientists with such experiments and dread the generation of any new monster organism (Subbaraman, 2021). As a response to that matter, scientists denied all similar assumptions and stated that this work could be an important step toward understanding many diseases and phenomena, and this last study provides strong evidence for that (Stein, 2021).

So no, as much as we love mythical creatures, we’re nowhere close to the rise of a prequel to a planet of semi-human apes yet!

Chimeric: refers to studies that involve mixed-species embryos in their research, It was named after the fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology that is part lion, part goat, and part snake.

Stem cells: human cells with the ability to develop into many other cell types with specialized functions (Slack, 2021).

HAVEN’T SATISFIED YOUR CURIOSITY YET?

STAY TUNED FOR MORE INTERESTING STEM NEWS

Last Edited: 08.05.2021