No Fertilization Needed: A Clump of Cells Grew a Beating Heart on Its Own
Release time:
2026-10-23
Without fertilization, can a clump of cells in a lab grow into an embryo? On October 14, the team of Ding Sheng, professor at Tsinghua University's School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, offered a preliminary answer in Nature: totipotent-like stem cells induced by small chemical molecules aggregate on their own without any manual assembly, and differentiate in the normal embryonic sequence — by day 12 they had formed a heart that had separated into atrium and ventricle and contracted rhythmically.
1. The starting point: dialing cells back to where life begins
In natural embryonic development the embryo grows a placenta and a yolk sac — the former delivers nutrients and transmits signals, the latter is the earliest site of blood formation. Untreated embryonic stem cells can turn into many cell types, yet cannot produce either of these, and so cannot develop into a complete individual. What Ding Sheng was after was precisely that starting cell — one like a fertilized egg. Since 2015 the team had been hunting for a "magic potion" that could do this; preliminary results came in 2017, but the cell state was hard to hold stable, so they did not publish. Only in 2022 did the team report in Nature a three-small-molecule chemical cocktail that reliably dialed stem cells back to the starting point. In the present study they added one more small molecule and, using treated cells alone, got them to grow into embryo models.
2. The process: from look-alike morphology to a heartbeat
By culture day 4, more than 70% of the cell clusters resembled mouse embryos 3–4 days after fertilization; by day 10, a very small number of models had grown rudimentary neural and intestinal structures, formed blood vessels and begun hematopoiesis; by day 12, several models' hearts had divided into atrium and ventricle, with blood cells already present in the chambers — judged on the heart alone, the developmental stage approached that of a normal embryo at day 10.5.
This differs from the international "assembly" brand of synthetic embryos: previously three kinds of stem cells — respectively responsible for the body, the placenta and the yolk sac — had to be prepared separately and then put together; such models skip the blastocyst stage and cannot be transferred into the uterus. Ding Sheng's models do pass through the blastocyst stage, so "in theory there is a chance they could be put back into the uterus and implant." He concedes that the hearts in every team's models are still very early-stage, and that "assembly" is more likely to produce results in the short term; but development progressively amplifies tiny errors, and he believes his route can go further.
3. The bottleneck: why it gets harder the further you go
The longer the culture, the fewer models keep developing: about 20% normal on day 7, under 10% on day 8, less than 1% on day 10, and only 3 that reached day 12. Ding Sheng likens embryonic development to a group dance: cells must differentiate in sequence, form tissues, and pass signals to their neighbors — "you can't be ahead, you can't lag behind, and you can't step out of line." Cells that develop too early or too late are like dancers who miss the beat and throw the whole rhythm off. He proposes two possibilities: first, the starting cells still retain some of their original characteristics; second, the culture environment is incomplete — in the uterus the embryo draws oxygen and nutrients from the mother's blood, whereas the lab can only compensate artificially. The team tried transplanting the models into mouse uteri: the models could implant and the uterus swelled accordingly, but within 10 days they were resorbed. To him, this is a screening mechanism that life itself carries.
The ethical boundary is just as clear: guidelines updated in 2025 by the International Society for Stem Cell Research prohibit implanting human stem-cell embryo models into human or animal uteri, and China's Ethical Guidelines for Human Organoid Research stipulate the same. As for when the first mouse will be born, Ding Sheng can give no timetable: "It is still a scientific question, not an engineering one."
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