Could synthetic cow embryos spark a reproductive revolution?
By James Reddick for Ambrook Research
Stem cell-derived embryos could make high-quality genetics
more accessible than ever — if scientists can finally
generate a live birth.
In a lab in Texas, and another in Florida — and in a handful of others throughout the world — researchers are trying to make something happen for the first time in history: a pregnancy without the use of an egg or sperm.
Using stem cells, scientists have grown what are essentially models of blastocysts — an embryo in a stage of development about six to eight days after fertilization. These so-called “blastoids” have a massive research potential, helping scientists to better our understanding of how embryos develop, why pregnancies fail, and the behavior of diseases.
But they also have another practical application that could have a huge impact on the agriculture industry.
“Think like Star Wars, like the army of clones, but an army of cows,” said Carlos Pinzón-Arteaga, one of the researchers on a team at UT Southwestern Medical Center that published the first “bovine blastoid” recipe in 2023.
The hope is to impregnate an animal with a synthetic embryo and to deliver a healthy pup. But the problem still beguiling researchers is that so far none of the blastoids have successfully resulted in a pregnancy.
Cows in Florida
Since 2023, a research team at the University of Florida led by the reproductive biologist Zongliang “Carl” Jiang has been trying out the synthetic embryos in cows. After giving hormones to recipient cows, his team uses catheters to deposit blastoids into the uterus.
After a few days, they flush them out and examine them for signs of development. Jiang hasn’t yet published the results of the most recent trials but early attempts were unsuccessful.
“We’ve never recovered any viable structures,” Pinzón-Arteaga said. “Once they get into the cow, they just die.”
This isn’t altogether surprising. The use of embryonic stem cells from cows is relatively new compared to other animals, and therefore not well understood; the blastoids likely need tweaking if they are going to successfully create a pregnancy. But the potential is massive: A farmer looking to improve their herd’s genetics could pay a company to transfer blastoids derived from the cloned stem cells of, say, a champion heifer.
“Think like Star Wars, like the army of clones, but an army of cows.”
The process would likely be similar to embryo transfer today, which is part of the in-vitro fertilization process, but it wouldn’t require the extraction of eggs from a mother cow. And even more importantly, once you have the blastoid recipe figured out they are easy to make en masse.
“You are not bound by a limited number of embryos,” said Jun Wu, an associate professor in the department of molecular biology at UT Southwestern who collaborated with Jiang to create bovine blastoids. “With stem cells, essentially every week we can produce hundreds of thousands of these.”
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