Human embryos in a dish – modeling early embryonic development with pluripotent stem cells

Stem cell-based embryo models present new opportunities to study early embryonic development. In a recent study, Kagawa et al. identified an approach to create human pluripotent stem cell-based blastoids that resemble the human blastocysts. These blastoids efficiently generated analogs of the EPI, TE, PrE lineages with transcriptomes highly similar to those found in vivo. Furthermore, the formation of these lineages followed the same sequence and pace of blastocyst development, and was also dependent on the same pathways required for lineage specification. Finally, the blastoids were capable of attaching to stimulated endometrial cells to mimic the process of implantation. While more comprehensive analysis is needed to confirm its validity and usefulness, this new blastoid system presents the latest development in the attempt to model early human embryogenesis in vitro.