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August 6, 2019 03:30 am

First Human-Monkey Chimera Raises Concern Among Scientists

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Efforts to create human-animal chimeras have rebooted an ethical debate after reports emerged that scientists have produced monkey embryos containing human cells. A chimera is an organism whose cells come from two or more "individuals", with recent work looking at combinations from different species. The word comes from a beast from Greek mythology which was said to be part lion, part goat and part snake. The latest report, published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, claims a team of researchers led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte from the Salk Institute in the U.S. have produced monkey-human chimeras. The research was conducted in China "to avoid legal issues," according to the report. Chimeras are seen as a potential way to address the lack of organs for transplantation, as well as problems of organ rejection. Scientists believe organs genetically matched to a particular human recipient could one day be grown inside animals. The approach is based on taking cells from an adult human and reprogramming them to become stem cells, which can give rise to any type of cell in the body. They are then introduced into the embryo of another species. Details of the work reported this week are scarce: Izpisua Belmonte and colleagues did not respond to requests for comment. However Alejandro De Los Angeles, from the department of psychiatry at Yale University, said it was likely monkey-human chimeras were being developed to explore how to improve the proportion of human cells in such organisms. De Los Angeles pointed out that, as with previous work in pigs and sheep, the human-monkey chimeras have reportedly only been allowed to develop for a few weeks -- ie before organs actually form. Prof Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist from London's Francis Crick Institute, agreed with De Los Angeles. "I don't think it is particularly concerning in terms of the ethics, because you are not taking them far enough to have a nervous system or develop in any way -- it's just really a ball of cells," he said. But Lovell-Badge added that if chimeras were allowed to develop further, it could raise concerns. "How do you restrict the contribution of the human cells just to the organ that you want to make?" he said. "If that is a pancreas or a heart or something, or kidney, then that is fine if you manage to do that. [But] if you allow these animals to go all the way through and be born, if you have a big contribution to the central nervous system from the human cells, then that obviously becomes a concern."

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