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This will not only help people to overcome infertility due to old age or disease but also allow same sex couples to have genetically related child.
The method requires significant refinement – which could take a decade – before a fertility clinic could even consider using it. (Getty Images)
For the first time, US scientists have made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people’s skin cells and then fertilising it with sperm.
The research was by a team at Oregon Health and Science University. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
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BBC quoted the experts as saying that the new technique takes the nucleus – which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body – out of a skin cell. This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions.
This will not only help people to overcome infertility due to old age or disease but also allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child.
“We achieved something that was thought to be impossible,” said Prof. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the director of the Oregon Health and Science University’s centre for embryonic cell and gene therapy.
He further said, “The largest group of patients who might benefit would be women of advanced maternal age. Another group are those who have been through chemotherapy because that can affect their ability to have viable eggs.”
“We used female skin cells in this study, but you could use skin cells from males as well,” Mitalipov told The Guardian. “You could make eggs for men, and that way, of course, this would be applicable to same-sex couples.”
The method requires significant refinement, which could take a decade, before a fertility clinic could even consider using it, BBC reported.
The Guardian quoted the experts as saying that the major challenge the scientists faced was that healthy human eggs contain only 23 chromosomes.
Prof. Richard Anderson, deputy director of MRC Centre for reproductive health at the University of Edinburgh, said the ability to generate new eggs “would be a major advance”.
He said, “There will be very important safety concerns but this study is a step towards helping many women have their own genetic children.”
Prof. Ying Cheong of the University of Southampton said, “In practice, clinicians are seeing more and more people who cannot use their own eggs, often because of age or medical conditions. While this is still very early laboratory work, in the future it could transform how we understand infertility and miscarriage and perhaps one day open the door to creating egg- or sperm-like cells for those who have no other options.”
United States of America (USA)
October 01, 2025, 04:38 IST
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