Short Wave - The International Race To Create Human Eggs And Sperm In The Lab

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

In which we meet the pioneers of one of the most exciting — and controversial — fields of biomedical research: in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG. The goal of IVG is to make unlimited supplies of what Hayashi calls "artificial" eggs and sperm from any cell in the human body. That could let anyone — older, infertile, single, gay, trans — have their own genetically related babies. As such, the field opens up a slew of ethical concerns. But that isn't stopping researchers from pressing forward. So, this episode NPR science correspondent Rob Stein gives us a glimpse into the global race to create the first artificial human embryos to see how the competition is unfolding. Want to hear more cutting-edge technology? Email the show at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Regina Barber here, and today I've conned NPR health correspondent Rob Stein into hanging out with us. How you doing, Rob? I'm doing great, Gina. So nice to be back. You're welcome anytime, Rob. So you're here to talk about one of the hottest, but also one of the most controversial fields of biomedical research right now. That's right. It's called in vitro gametogenesis. Okay, that sounds intense. Totally. It's called IVG for short.

IVG sounds a lot like IVF, the fertility treatment. Bingo. You can sort of think of IVG as a kind of IVF 2.0, but instead of mixing natural sperm and eggs in a test tube, IVG would make what some scientists call artificial sperm and eggs in the lab from any cell in anybody's body. And scientists have been working on this for decades, but it might finally be on the horizon. Rob, this sounds like science fiction. One of my skin cells could become an egg or sperm. That's right. Sperm and eggs that could create an embryo in the lab just like IVF, but IVG, it would render the biological clock irrelevant, helping anyone of any age have a genetically related baby.

Same for anyone single, gay, trans. I mean, that sounds really exciting, but I can imagine it also might be controversial. Absolutely. IVG raises a long list of ethical, social, legal, and societal concerns because IVG could allow people to create babies with very specific genes or combinations of genes in ways never before possible. I talk about this with Marcy Darnovsky. She runs the Center for Genetics in Society. Combining IVG and genome editing and commercialization, you've really got kind of a toxic stew to create people who are supposedly biologically, superior to others. We don't want to pave the road toward any kind of future that looks anything like that. Today on the show, The Future of Babymaking. We look at the global race to create the first

artificial human embryos. Rob also takes us on tours of labs in Japan and here in the U.S. to see how the competition is unfolding. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, Rob, before we dive into the controversy of IVG, this IVF 2.4. Walk me through some of the science behind this research. Sure. You know, and to do that, I'd like to introduce you to two scientists who essentially launched this whole field and are still on the leading edge of making IVG a reality. They live and work in Japan.

We'll be stopping at Shin Yokohama. And that's where I find Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi at Osaka University. Hi, how are you? Hayashi is famous in scientific circles because he was the first one to make IVG look like it could really work. He leads me into his lab to show me how. Hayashi pulls a dish from an incubator and slides it under a microscope.

First, Hayashi figured out how to turn skin cells from mice into mouse eggs. Oh, wow. Each of those glowing blue balls is an egg. Yeah, yeah, yes. In one experiment, basically, we can make 4,000 eggs. 4,000 eggs. These are like little egg factories.

Each one of these are the little egg factory. Kind of an egg factor in the mouse. Then, Hayashi went even further. He used the artificial mouse eggs to breed healthy baby mice, triggering an international race to do the same thing for people. So where are we in the human IBG race? To find out about that, Hayashi says I should visit his colleague, Professor Minori Saito at Kyoto University. Hello? Professor Saitu. Yes, this is Michinori Saito.

Saito's the first, and so far only, scientists to prove he could turn human cells into. to very primitive human eggs. I'm guessing that's a pretty top secret process. Yeah, you guess that right. At least at the moment, while they're racing with other scientists around the world to try to make this work. Saitu takes me into his lab to show me the next step.

And that's the cultural. Cell cultural. That's the most kind of important place. Most important place, because this is where Saitu is trying to coaxes primitive human eggs into maturity. For example, you know, we are trying to understand signals that instruct

our cells maturation. To tell the cells, you should start to become an egg. Yeah, exactly. The Japanese scientists think it'll take years, maybe five to ten years, to figure out precisely which signals are needed to activate just the right genes to get their very primitive artificial IVG eggs

to mature enough to try to fertilize them to make an embryo. And then many more years to show artificial embryos aren't carrying, you know, dangerous genetic mutations. Wow. Okay. So it sounds like IVG is still really far away. Well, it depends who you talk to. Really? Okay. Yeah. You know, and just the possibility of IVG is generating a lot of excitement among infertility patients and in the queer community. And that made it start to attract a lot of money. Several biotech startups have jumped into the IVG race to try to accelerate and commercialize this technology faster.

And before going to Japan, I visited the company that's probably the most well-funded. It's in California. Of course. Of course it's in California. It was a cloudy day in Berkeley, California, and I turned onto a gritty side street near the San Francisco Bay and rang the bell on a low concrete building with big frosted glass doors. Hey, I'm Matt Chryslaw. A guy named Matt Chrysleroff, one of the founders of a company called Conception, greets me at the door. What are you guys trying to do?

conception all about? Yeah, so basically we're trying to turn a type of stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell into a human egg, ultimately with the goal if it's safe to do it for fertility purposes. And why? My personal biggest interest in it is that it could allow same-sex couples to be able to have biological children together as well. Yeah, I'm gay and it's something that got me so personally interested in this in the first place. Same goes for one of Concepcion's other co-founders, Pablo Hurtado. There is something intrinsic sharing a lot of that is half me and half my husband. I don't have that capacity right now,

and I am devoting my life to try to change that. They say the company's gotten closer to making IVG a reality than anyone else. Okay, so how close are they to the Japanese researchers? Like equal progress or... Okay, Gina, you've got to be a little bit patient here. We'll get to that, I promise. To show me what they've done and how Bianca Seris, their third co-founder, takes me into their lab.

It's quite loud in here. Furtado opens an incubator and pulls out a clear round lab dish. These are primordial germ cell-like cells. Primordial germ-cell-like cells, stem cells that are company made from human blood cells that have been fed a special protein elixir to coax them into developing into cells that could become either sperm or eggs.

And that's something that we do later on. He slides the dish under the microscope. Instead of clumping together and calms, like stem cells, each primordial germ cell-like cell is visibly much more distinct. So in this case, you can see each individual cell as a circle? Oh, wow. Yeah, I see them. They are maturing into becoming more independent, and in fact, fun fact is egg cells are truly independent, and they actually will need to become one cell within that follicle.

A follicle, the part of the ovaries that cradles each egg into maturity. Hurtado quickly returns the cells to the incubator and pulls out a rectangular dish. These are some of our mini ovaries. The mini ovaries are combinations of cells the company made to nurture the primordial germ-cell-like cells into their next step of development. Hopefully what you can appreciate here is you can see our mini ovary, and then you can see a lot of dots that are really red fluorescent. Each of those cells is a germ cell. A germ cell, a very immature human egg cell.

I like to call it a Christmas tree because it's like all the lights. Make people happy when they see something like this. Within a year, Chryslov hopes they'll prove the follicles in those many ovaries can mature the immature eggs into fully developed eggs, capable of being fertilized to make embryos and babies. And so as far as we know, we're the first in the world that have been able to do this. So it's really exciting because we think it means we're quite close to being able to have proof-of-concept human eggs instead of this abstract idea that's really just an imaginative science fiction idea that really indicates that, hey, this technology is actually closer than people think. Within a year, that's so soon.

Yeah, I know. But, you know, the company's only released a few details about their experiments, so independent scientists can't validate their claims. but it's way sooner than the Japanese scientists think. So what do the Japanese scientists think about the U.S. biotech claim? Well, you know, Katsuhiko at Osaka University, he's pretty skeptical. It's impossible, to my opinion. One year, right? I don't think so. I know. And Saito, he's similarly doubtful. That's amazing.

Amazing, like, you believe it, or amazing, like, you're skeptical? I don't really know. You know, some sort of incredible or how they say, a scientific breakthrough may happen, but let's see. Have you gotten that far? We are working on that. You are, yeah. Have you had any success?

That's not yet published, so I cannot tell. But, you know, Hayashi says he thinks he and Saito are at least as close as the Americans, but even if they can figure out how to make IVG work in humans and prove it safe, you know, both tall orders, the Japanese. scientists are cautious for another reason. There are so many ethical problems. So this is a thing that we have to really think about. Okay, so let's get into those ethical issues.

Like, what are they? Well, you know, there are lots of them. For example, IVG could not only help really anyone have genetically related babies. IVG could make traditional baby making antiquated for everyone. Wait, for everyone? Yep, IVG clinics could start mass. producing artificial embryos, so parents could use only those with the healthiest genes and possibly the traits they want. And that, of course, raises a specter of eugenics.

What about in Japan? Is IVG controversial there too? Yes, definitely. And to talk about that, I met with Missau Fujita. She's a bioethicist at Kyoto University. She says that Japanese share U.S. queasiness about mass-producing human embryos. Then that mean maybe exploitation of embryos commercialization of reproduction, and also you could manipulate genetic information. That means you can create a designer baby. It reminds me of plain God. But Japan would even be uncomfortable about creating babies outside traditional families. A single person can create his or her own baby. So who is mother and father? So that means social confusion.

But, you know, Gina, for another perspective, I talked with Stanford University bioethicist Hank Greeley. I'm a fan of the IVG idea. I think it offers the possibility for millions of couples who desperately want to have kids that are genetically half one, half the other, who can't do that now to have those children. That said, Greeley also worries about commercial pressures pushing IVG too fast. Silicon Valley has tried for a couple of decades now to get a piece of the four trillion. dollars we spend on health. And a lot of their efforts have failed because the FDA does not want you to move fast and break things. And the FDA has a lot of power. This needs to be regulated, especially for safety. I'm confident the FDA, if given a chance, we'll use that power because we don't think babies are like iPhones.

Greeley does acknowledge that there are lots of possibilities that do raise lots of thorny questions. Like what is he thinking? You know, he's worried about the things like, you know, people using cells from children or the elderly or even dead people to try to make babies or, you know, cells stolen from celebrities to make babies without their consent. You know, it's even possible that groups of people could all contribute DNA to a single baby. Okay, so Rob, what do the scientists have to say about all this? You know, they're uncomfortable with some of the implications, too. Here's Professor Mittnori Saito again at Kyoto University. Science always have good aspect and also have, I'm not sure it's bad, but negative impact, like atomic bombs or any technological development.

If you use it in a wise manner, it's always good, but everything can be used in a bad way. Even so, Saito and Hayashi hope the Japanese government will support something the U.S. government would never support today, the creation of artificial embryos to help them win the race to make IVG reality. What do the folks at Conception say? Matt Kristoloff and his colleagues acknowledge the concerns, but they told me they would welcome government regulation. There's all sorts of gray areas that society really needs to figure out. But yeah, opening this door for so many more people is including, you know, me and Pablo,

a really cool thing. If it could lead to so many people being able to have families and children being able to have lives, I just think that's a really beautiful thing. Rob, this is fascinating. So it sounds like there'll be many updates to come on this story, so I'm looking forward to having you on the pod at least one more time to keep us posted. Thank you so much.

Anytime. Happy to be here. Before we head out, a quick shout-out to our Shortwave Plus listeners. We appreciate you and we thank you for being a subscriber. Shortwave Plus helps support our show, and if you're a regular listener, we'd love for you to join so you can enjoy the show without sponsor interruptions.

Find out more at plus.mpr.org slash shortwave. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy. It was edited by our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez and Scott Hensley. Rob Check the Facts. Maggie Luthor was our audio engineer. Our senior director is Beth Donovan and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Regina Barber. Like always, thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.